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Slate fisks the Swift Vets.
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Originally posted by bilmore
Strongly disagree. Many young activists cut their teeth, and made their reps, on this exact same philosophy back then. The antiwar crowd was huge, and it ultimately won, and those pols who represented it are today's leaders on one side. I think he truly was anti-war, so I won't say he deliberately made this political calculation in order to become attractive, but everyone knew it wasn't a bad place to be. And, back then, what he was mainly known for was self-aggrandizement. Even Trudeau made his shameless self-promotion the subject of a week's worth of comics at that time.
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Thomas Oliphant, writing in a piece that I linked to here not too long ago, recalls talking about this very issue with Kerry back in the day, and both of them thinking that Kerry was hurting his chances for future political office. Of course, you can just say that Kerry calculated that he would be attacked for opportunism, and so he was lying to Oliphant at the time so that he'd have a defender.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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