McCain being 'Swift Boat'-ed

[Taylorcofan]

McCain being 'Swift Boat'-ed
BY GEORGE RUSH
Monday, August 25th 2008, 7:47 AM /AP

Senator John McCain.
Sen. John McCain commands support at many VFW halls across the
country. But a squadron of Vietnam vets and POW/MIA advocates is
strafing him with decidedly unfriendly fire.

Two-tour Green Beret Ted Sampley, who helped "Swift Boat" Democrat
John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race, is now gunning for the GOP
White House hopeful.

The organizer of Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain claims the
Purple Heart-winning former POW has "never admitted the full extent to
which he cooperated with his captors." Sampley also charges that, in
the 1990s, the "unstable" McCain, whom he calls "the Manchurian
Candidate," ignored "credible evidence" that American POWs were still
alive in Southeast Asia.

"He wanted to normalize relations with Vietnam," Sampley tells us. "He
took away the only leverage we had for getting those soldiers back.
Why? He was paying back the Vietnamese for keeping quiet about him."

McCain has called Sampley a profiteering "enemy of the truth" and "one
of the most despicable people I have ever had the misfortune to
encounter."

Though he's no fan of Barack Obama, Sampley says Fox News producers
haven't invited him on to bash McCain the way he bashed Kerry. But
Sampley is finding other comrades. Former POW Phillip Butler asserts
that McCain "allows the media to make him out to be the hero POW,
which he knows is absolutely not true."

Former GOP Congressmen Bill Hendon and John LeBoutillier, who both
served on the House Task Force on POW/MIA Affairs, write on Sampley's
U.S. Veteran Dispatch that McCain "abandoned American POWs."

"He's totally dishonest," says LeBoutillier, who contends that, to win
over the religious right, McCain "cribbed" his recent memory of a
kindly guard leaving "a cross in the dirt" from Jeremiah Denton,
another POW-turned-senator who told a similar story.