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Here ya go.

http://www.wintersoldier.com/i...

It is well known that John Kerry testified against the Vietnam war in a congressional hearing. This link is the second one found by google.

I'm not saying anything one way or the other but him speaking out against the war is a well known thing.

Well, John Kerry was also a soldier - so when you say him testifying against the Vietnam war means he "vilified soldiers and was anti-military", he was the equivalent of the "self-hating jew" as far as Vietnam goes.

Here ya go.

http://www.wintersoldier.com/i...

It is well known that John Kerry testified against the Vietnam war in a congressional hearing. This link is the second one found by google.

I'm not saying anything one way or the other but him speaking out against the war is a well known thing.

ME:Frankly, I get really PO'd at those who accuse the US intentionally causing undue harm to innocents. It pissed me off during Vietnam, and it pissed me off now. It caused me to spend 2004 fighting John Kerry's campaign because he used such slander against all of us who participated in that war.

Yeah, good plan. Fight someone who spoke out against such abuses that he saw in the middle of a war, which put someone back in office who actually tortures innocents. (And not in the heat of battle, either.) Way to defend this country's image. It's like fighting crime by arresting people who report crime. That will cause crime to decrease!

There's a little problem with your assertion. He did NOT see those abuses. I know people who served with him in the Swift Boats and the reason they went after him so hard was because he was tarring them especially with phony atrocity charges - and he had been one of them. John Kerry simply stated exactly the North Vietnamese (through their front, the PRG) line - exactly, which is not surprising since he met with them in Paris before he made his infamous appearance before the Senate. That there were some abuses by American soldiers in Vietnam is, of course, true. There are ALWAYS abuses in war, no matter how hard you try to stop them - no matter what the policy. But Kerry's statements were lies, just as his and Jane Fonda's phony Winter Soldier investigation was classic agitprop guerrilla theater instead of a search for truth. Read all about it at http://www.wintersoldier.com/ .

John Kerry was not a whistle blower. He was a liar and aided our enemies. If you want to hear a bit more about this, check out the interview with Swiftboat spokesman John O'Neil at http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/2007/09/16/behind-the-scenes-swift-boat-veterans-vs-john-kerry/ .

As for the "someone who actually tortures innocents" "not

For a person with "too much education in formal logic" you are remarkably poor at applying it, since you still are assuming that my information, because of my viewpoint, is wrong. If you don't consider that sort of logic to be related to ad hominem, then which logical fallacy is it?

Your postings make my point rather well, actually. Throwing out my information (including information you don't know about because it was not in the list I gave), because of my viewpoint, is exactly the problem with whoever moderated it out at Wikipedia. Information doesn't have a viewpoint, but the way it is presented and the way it is interpreted can - and an invalid analysis is to completely discredit the viewpoint because it comes from a partisan. It would be reasonable to be suspicious of the information if it comes from a declared partisan, but then one should be just as supicious if it comes from a declared neutral - the latter could be a conscious partisan but lying, or an unconscious partisan - but the real reason for suspicion shouldn't be the political beliefs of the presenter, but the general suspicion given to all new assertions.

If you go to http://www.wintersoldier.com/, you will find, in one of the essays, that I defend one aspect of John Kerry's past - not because I like him (I detest him) but in the interest of accuracy. Too bad you apparently don't believe that an anti-Kerry partisan could possibly have any truth to tell, much less truth that helps the pro-Kerry argument.

Formal logic does not lead one to discarding information due to the views of the source. And yes, I also have been trained in formal logic, but perhaps not as recently as you, and perhaps not in the same areas. Shall we have a propositional calculus war too, just to score some points?

As to ad hominem, have fun, dude, but you are missing the obviuos.

"being" ad hominem, in the context is was used, clearly means using ad hominem argumentation. Ad hominem argumentation is what I was talking about. It means attacking the person making the argument rather than addressing that person's points. It is a common but usually invalid rhetorical tactic.

In Latin - it means "to the person."

Partisan politics is the only kind of politics that exists, and politics is how a democracy operates. Sorry you don't understand that, or understand that Wikipedia, in the instance I mentioned, was engaging in partisan politics itself. Being a partisan is not an indicator of small mindedness or large mindedness. To presume either one is poor thinking.

You line of fallacious reasoning is:

1) A person providing information has taken a particular side of a related argument.

2) Therefore, the information is false or otherwise unworthy of inclusion.

Talk about a lack of critical thinking, and small-mindedness! This is exactly the fallacy that ad hominem argumentation frequently leads to.

There were a number of easily validated facts about John Kerry that appeared (at the time) neither in Wikipedia nor the main stream media. One example is the contemporanious publication by North Vietnam of the propaganda piece, quoting Kerry, that I provided in my previous posting. There were many others. A harder to validate one (but one which we validated) was that Kerry's picture hung in the Saigon war museum ("War Remnants Museum") in a room dedicated to foreigners who helped the North Vietnamese win the war. How about the fact that the two "Kerry crewmembers" who spoke for him at the Democratic National Convention had a total of six days of service under Kerry between them, while the one who is against him served longer than any other Kerry crewman (but of more importance is the testimony of boat captains, because the boats always operated in groups, and it was the captains with the most situational awareness)? Then there's the odd way in which his Navy discharge dates (on his website) changed when he was forced to put out some of his military records - from impossible dates (and since I joined the same month he did, I know the possible dates easily) to more reasonable ones which were still incorrect? How about the press conference where every officer who had ever had Kerry in his chain of command (while Kerry was on the Swift Boats), up to CINCPAC, said he was unfit to be Commander in Chief - an event unprecedented in American history? And on... and on... and on...

I just looked at the current Wikipedia section on Kerry and it biased to the point of being hagiographic. It leaves out many facts, and the general tone is very favorable to Kerry - especially in the section about Kerry's testimony to the Senate, the nature of the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth and who served on which boat (and the irrelevancy of that particular issue), and the nature of the VVAW.

As a Vietnam veteran, I became a partisan after hearing Kerry's Senate testimony for the first time early last year. It was so full of lies, and so vile in it's clearly intended effect, that it galvanized my activism, as it did many other Vietnam vets. Being painted as a psycho baby killer sometimes has that effect on people!

But Kerry's a dead issue so I feel no need to try and correct the article and once again face an unrealistic standard of truth that the current article could never survive. If the Wikipedia operators truly care about the truth, they will try to fix it themselves - the information is easily available - much of it at http://www.wintersoldier.com/ - and much of that information can be validated even though that site is anti-Kerry (which, to your narrow way of thinking, means all he information on it is useless).

Right now, the Wikipedia entry on Kerry is a propaganda piece, which is sad, but illustrative of the difficulty of having an accurate encyclopedia using the Wiki process - at least the way the Wikipedia folks are doing it.

No, the book was not a Kerry bashing book. It was written years before and examined the treatment Vietnam Vets received in society and why. It had only a little bit of information about Kerry.

As I mentioned in my reply to another poster, your comment is ad hominem. That I was an anti-Kerry partisan does not mean that my facts were incorrect or that my sources were invalid.

That the book was summarily dismissed as not even existing, without the Wiki person checking Amazon or another bookstore shows the level of bias applied to that particular subject.

You might also ask how I became an anti-Kerry partisan. It was a result of reading, last year, facts from the congressional record (hardly a biased source) and CSPAN - quotes from Kerry himself, and comparing them to my personal knowledge of the Vietnam War and that of those I knew and what I had read.

And yes, I became the webmaster of an existing site called kerrylied.com, which was an organizing point for Vietnam Veterans who had been slandered by Kerry's senate testimony and the Winter Soldier "investigation." If you are interested in that subject, you should go to http://www.wintersoldier.com/ and read some facts, well suppported, that you probably didn't hear from the MSM.

However, all of this is irrelevantg to Wikipedia. What counts is the substance of the entry and the references, not the nature of the personal views of the person supplying them. This is why Wikipedia will always be untrustworthy on controversial subjects, and that is my whole point.

the audio

the man also shot a guy in the back to get a medal - 'chased VC inland behind Hootch and shot him while he fled'. (6th line) a man of conscience?

wow.

On January 31, 1971, members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) met in a Detroit hotel to document war crimes that they had participated in or witnessed during their combat tours in Vietnam. During the next three days, more than 100 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians gave anguished, emotional testimony describing hundreds of atrocities against innocent civilians in South Vietnam, including rape, arson, torture, murder, and the shelling or napalming of entire villages. The witnesses stated that these acts were being committed casually and routinely, under orders, as a matter of policy.

In April, the VVAW stormed Washington in a week-long protest. At the height of it, spokesman John Kerry went before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to accuse the United States military of committing massive numbers of war crimes in Vietnam. The appearance launched Kerry's political career. The charges he made shocked and sickened a nation, changed the course of a war and stained the reputation of the American military for decades.

But the mass murder of civilians was never American policy in Vietnam. War crimes were the exception, not the rule. And the Winter Soldier tribunal itself -- which John Kerry had helped moderate -- turned out to be, in the words of historian Guenter Lewy, "packed with pretenders and liars."

Massachusetts elected John Kerry to the U.S. Senate in 1984. Now he seeks the most powerful job in the world.

"There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 calibre machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals.

-John Kerry, Meet The Press, April 18, 1971

That is the incriminating quote. IF you hadn't seen this yet, you just haven't been looking. Audio

When I read the transcript of John Kerry speaking to the Senate in 1971, I can't help but feel that this man is more to be trusted with our troops than a man who spent the early '70s "boasting about how much alcohol he had consumed the night before."

If you feel that John Kerry is trustworthy because you read that transcript, you should read Vetting the Vet Record and spend some time at wintersoldier.com. You might have second thoughts.

Please, explain to me, in a logical and easy to understand way, what exactly you believe is bad about that quote from Kerry. Also, if you could, explain to me exactly what you meant when you said Kerry was "full of shit". To what statements were you referring, and is there any evidence that his statements were lies?

Here are two good links to get you started:

Vetting the Vet Record

wintersoldier.com

If you read those, it shouldn't take you too long to start getting your feet on solid ground.

In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans , which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This book was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that many of Lane's "eye witnesses" either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed.

Nonetheless, Sen. Mark Hatfield inserted the transcript of the Winter Soldier testimonies into the Congressional Record and asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps to investigate the war crimes allegedly committed by Marines. When the Naval Investigative Service attempted to interview the so-called witnesses, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they may have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans. Guenter Lewy tells the entire study in his book, America in Vietnam.

In April, the VVAW stormed Washington in a week-long protest. At the height of it, spokesman John Kerry went before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to accuse the United States military of committing massive numbers of war crimes in Vietnam. The appearance launched Kerry's political career. The charges he made shocked and sickened a nation, changed the course of a war and stained the reputation of the American military for decades.

But the mass murder of civilians was never American policy in Vietnam. War crimes were the exception, not the rule. And the Winter Soldier tribunal itself -- which John Kerry had helped moderate -- turned out to be, in the words of historian Guenter Lewy, "packed with pretenders and liars."

I highly suggest you visit the site wintersoldier.com to learn about Kerry's Vietnam service... and the rather dishonorable actions after he secured discharge to advance his political career. And just remember that the media doesn't often report the full story; a lot of this stuff despite being congressional public record is simply ignored.

(Note to idiot moderators: I know it's offtopic. That's why I'm checking the "no karma bonus" button, and marking it OT in the subject. Don't you have a better post to moderate?)