The current spat over John Kerry’s medals taking place on television and in the press is a classic example of dirty politics.

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is a partisan political group running ads here in Wisconsin and a handful of other states in which they lob a heck of a defamatory hand grenade into the Kerry camp.

These fellow Vietnam vets claim that Kerry doesn’t deserve his medals and that his conduct in Vietnam was not deserving of the credit he received.

The ad that is airing is devastatingly effective if viewed in a vacuum. If you knew nothing about Kerry, or the group assaulting his honor, you’d think Kerry was a disingenuous grandstander.

What a close examination of the record shows is that it is the marshaled Swift Boat veterans who are dishonest, unsubstantiated and dishonoring the memory of Vietnam veterans.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is a classic political hatchet job funded and organized by wealthy Republican backers of questionable reputations.

First off, the group had been corralled by private investigators who used questionable tactics in gathering affidavits from the participants they interviewed. A few of the veterans have since recanted their official statements and claim the investigators who interviewed them changed the affidavits the veterans signed.

Also, the veterans themselves have had problems in their own consistency.

One of the group members, Larry Thurlow, received a Bronze Star for events that took place on the very same day Kerry’s did. He claims that the report that described his actions that day in Vietnam is no longer accurate and without any shred of documentary evidence, claims Kerry fabricated the report that gave both Kerry and Thurlow their medals.

A DA in Oregon who signed the Swift Boat petition later admitted he didn’t actually witness anything his affidavit claimed and outraged local vets are asking for his resignation.

You’ll find the term, “complete lack of documentary evidence” a reoccurring theme in the Swift Boat veteran attacks.

The commanding officer, Lt. Commander George Elliot, who says in the ad “John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam,” said in 1969, “In a combat environment often requiring independent decisive action Lt. j.g. Kerry was unsurpassed.”

The medic who claims in the ad that Kerry lied about his wounds doesn’t have his name appear on a single record of Kerry’s medical treatment.

The two authors of the book Unfit for Command, in which the Swift Boat veterans complaints are compiled, are also of questionable background.

John O’Neill, co-author, was a creation of the Nixon administration in response to the devastating testimony of a returning decorated Vietnam vet. That vet was John Kerry.

When Kerry testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and made comments that still sting the Vietnam veteran community, the Nixon administration decided it had to produce a young decorated soldier to contradict Kerry’s powerful denunciation of the Vietnam War.

Ever since, O’Neill has been attacking Kerry like, well, it’s his job.

O’Neill’s co-author, Jerome Corsi, is even easier to detest. His comments on the chat boards of FreeRepublic.com have compared Muslims to Satanists, made fun of Chelsea Clinton for being fat and called all Muslims gay child molesters.

Not a single one of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were ever on Kerry’s boat and all of the men, with one exception, who did serve under Kerry fully support him.

Of course this all is avoiding the big elephant in the room for the Republican Party. While Kerry was in Vietnam, their own candidate was dodging his responsibilities in Alabama, blowing millions of dollars in training to fly an airplane by not taking his required physical and avoiding real danger.

Since the Swift Boat veterans are smearing by innuendo, what can we make of this little fact? The year that Bush “forgot” to take his physical, which grounded him as a pilot, the National Guard began random drug testing of pilots.

The military historian S.L.A. Marshall wrote a seminal book after WWII. In it he made the bold (and true) claim that fewer than 25 percent of soldiers in action in WWII ever fired their weapon. Marshall learned to take the stories of many men to put them together and find the truth. He knew that no one could ever claim to know what really happened in combat because it is inherently too chaotic.

Today there is no doubt Marshall would find this debate over Kerry’s medals a ridiculous exercise in second-guessing by people who can’t possibly lay claim to the truth.

This debate, taking place 30 years later and begun by people paid or coerced by ideologues (Karl Rove is close friends with the primary backer of the veterans) is what Republicans do best.

But it’s great to talk about for Bush because then we don’t talk about the war we’re dealing with right now, the failing economy, the ailing schools and the host of problems Bush has created or ignored.

Better to hash out the past and tarnish Kerry than deal with current events.

Rob Deters ([email protected]) is a third-year law student.