Sens. John Kerry, Lindsey Graham on CBS’ “Face the Nation”
The topics this weekend on CBS’ “Face the Nation” will be Iraq, Iran, the war on terror and this year’s presidential campaign.
The guests will be Sen. John Kerry, who supports presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a supporter of likely Republican nominee John McCain.
Although Kerry has not weighed in on Gen. Clark’s remarks, he did weigh in on Bud Day showing up on a McCain call. Sam Stein had the goods:
Sen. John McCain’s campaign on Monday launched the McCain “Truth Squad” – a group of political and Vietnam contemporaries who would counter attacks on the Senator’s military record.
In hopes of nipping any criticism in the bud, the campaign brought on board a man quite familiar with how these types of attacks gain legs: Bud Day, a fellow POW who was part of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that worked so hard to defame Sen. John Kerry’s own Vietnam record.
…
Asked to compare the attacks he helped launched against Kerry in 2004 to those being waged at McCain today, Day said the defining issue was truthfulness.
“The Swift Boat attacks were simply a revelation of the truth, the similarity does not exist here. What the Swift Boat campaign was about was to lay out John Kerry’s record. John Kerry has never produced any evidence to deny that. We are producing the evidence of these attacks right now to show that those remarks were completely inaccurate.”
John Kerry fired back a response:
Colonel Day’s comments today only further highlight the McCain campaign’s disregard for a new kind of politics,” Kerry said in a statement. “John McCain condemned these kinds of attacks in 2004 when he called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ‘dishonest and dishonorable.’ Senator McCain should condemn these remarks and cut ties with the Colonel and anyone else connected to SBVT. Day’s comments only serve to disparage all those who served on swift boats in Vietnam.”
It may pay to tune into how Kerry handles this story, as both an Obama surrogate and as a Vietnam vet who really was smeared.
Full Disclosure: I like John Kerry.
He’s been excellent and direct, both as an informed policymaker and observer of world politics and where we’re headed in terms of foreign relations and as a determined and farsighted supporter of Senator Obama.
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p>I’m looking forward to whatever he has to say about McCain’s shameful, hypocritical alliance with Bud Day and to anything he can let us know about his very recent trip to the Middle East.