VIETNAM VETERANS FOR ACADEMIC REFORM
The University of Kansas Student Auxiliary
V.V.A.R.: Leading the student revolt on campus against speech codes, political correctness, multiculturalism, gender feminism, dormitory re-education, lying about Vietnam, and other instruments of academic oppression.
Leonard Magruder - Founder/President
Former professor of psychology - Suffolk College, N.Y.
Member: National Association of Scholars
CONTACT: Magruder44@aol.com - Phone: 785-312-9303
(Vietnam vet contact: General Carl Schneider (ret.) Korea, Vietnam
dukesch@aol.com, 480-595-7668)
MEDIA DESPERATELY TRYING TO AVOID HEADLINE ”VIETNAM VETS REJECT KERRY” AS MAGRUDER PROTEST MOVES TO TOPEKA AND EASTWARD. VET GROUPS NATION-WIDE WILL JOIN IN PROTESTING AT LOCAL NEWSPAPERS, TUESDAY, JULY 20, 2004.
by Leonard Magruder
July 4, 2004
Special to American National Media, plus:
Globe and Mail – Canada
South Africa Times - South Africa
National Post Star – Canada
Australian – Australia
Free Press -Canada
Deccan Herald – India
Jornada - Mexico
India Today - India
Estado de Sao Paulo – Brazil
Diario Los Andes – Argentina
Middle East Times – Egypt
Japan Times – Japan
London Telegraph – England
Athens News – Greece
Guardian - England
The European - all Europe
Last week, major Kansas newspapers joined The Lawrence Journal-World in an effort to cover-up the story about Leonard Magruder’s protest at the Lawrence newspaper. Carrying a sign that read “Stop the Media Cover-Up for Kerry”, Magruder, President of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, stood for two hours in front of the paper’s offices while reporters and editors walked by, studiously ignoring him.
Bill Fishburne of North Carolina’s strongest radio station, WWNC, hearing about the Lawrence incident invited Magruder to tell his story on his half-hour show last Sunday, reaching not only the people of North Carolina but those in parts of adjacent states. They heard him discuss the top story related to national security being covered up by the mainstream media: the massive evidence that Vietnam vets reject Kerry as Commander-in-Chief.
Magruder reviewed the evidence he had presented in his last four press releases that the media is covering up the fact that a significant majority of Vietnam veterans, people who have experienced war, say that Kerry is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. Said Mr. Magruder, “There must be a reason. The American people need to hear it.”
“We first complained about the cover-up in a press release of April 21, 2004, with a list of the anecdotal data on vet rejection of Kerry that had appeared by that time. We protested a second time on May 3, 2004. By then data was coming in from Vietnam vet groups all over the country confirming the vet rejection of Kerry and we began reporting it in our releases. A third press release went out on May 9. By this time we had been interviewed by two national outlets, on Geoff Metcalf national radio and by Insight Magazine Online.
This claim of a cover-up was confirmed on May 4 at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth announced that 220 out of 229 Swift boat Vietnam veterans contacted (96%) had signed an open letter to Kerry challenging his fitness to serve as Commander-in-Chief. This is the unit Kerry served with in Vietnam. Those who signed included the entire chain of command above Lt. Kerry, including Admiral Roy Hoffman, who said “I do not believe John Kerry is fit to be Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces.”
NBC, ABC, and the Associated Press all refused to report to the American people on the conference. Dan Rather mentioned it briefly on CBS Evening News but dismissed it as “allied with the Bush campaign.” On May 16 we issued a fourth press release calling on vets to protest by turning off CBS Evening News. By then we were able to report the data from 28 Vietnam vet groups showing that an estimated 75% rejected of Kerry as unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. There was no group that supported him.
A second confirmation of the Magruder data came when Talon News out of Washington, D.C., in a press release titled, “Veterans Deserting Kerry,” said, “A CBS News poll released this week contained some devastating news for the Kerry campaign. Buried deep inside the internals of a CBS poll released Wednesday was this startling statistic - veterans prefer Bush over Kerry by a whopping 13 points. 54 to 41. Not surprisingly, coverage of the stunning poll result has been slim to none. ‘It’s buried in every poll that I have seen,’ said Bush-Cheney spokesman Scott Stanzel.”
That is the issue. The mainstream media is cheating to help Kerry. This is a legitimate news story, of great importance to the American people. The headline is “Vietnam vets reject Kerry.” The media is burying it to protect Kerry.
What Vietnam veterans are saying, in poll after poll, is that Kerry would be very weak on national security, compared to President Bush. As J. Michael Waller of Insight/News recently said, “A trademark of the Kerry school of statecraft is making common cause with enemies of the United States - and allowing himself to be used by them - in order to win political battles at home.” We see this in his meetings with the Viet Cong in Paris, his meetings with Communist Ortega in Nicaragua, his comments about Reagan’s attack on Libya, and his recent comment in South Carolina that “terrorism is exaggerated.”
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth responded to this media cover-up for Kerry by stating, “These men are neither pawns nor shills, they deserve better than to be ignored and maligned by media organizations increasingly difficult to distinguish from the Kerry campaign itself.”
This is not the first suggestion that the media is campaigning for Kerry.
Shawn Macombe in “John Kerry’s Free Media Pass” said, “Most American would likely find John Kerry’s past Vietnam behavior important for their decision as to whether he should be president. Right now they have not been given this information.”
Others, in a recent edition of The National Review wrote, “The media has brushed off the issue of Kerry’s past as irrelevant or a pointless ‘refighting’ of the Vietnam War.”
Syndicated talk show host Hugh Hewitt wrote, “The conventional wisdom floating downstream from Washington is that Senator Kerry’s anti-war radicalism following his return from Vietnam shouldn’t - and won’t- be an issue in November.”
There you have it. The media elite have decided, once again, as they did in the matter of the Tet Offensive, what is best for us to know. No wonder CBS insider Bernard Goldberg titled his latest book on media bias, Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media.
For the media, with the power it yields, to leave the American people with no real understanding of the significance of contemporary events, no understanding of Islam, no understanding of terrorism, and no understanding of a presidential candidate, makes it indeed something to be “rescued” from.
CBS, in its evening news program last night, stooped to a new low, mocking President Bush through a rapid-fire, out-of-context, presentation of three similar phrases Bush had used. Earlier, Dan Rather lied when he said the Muslim cleric Santani had not had a chance to meet with Bremer, knowing full well Santani had said he would not meet with Bremer because he was “unclean.” Dan Rather, covering for Islamic bigotry.
Meanwhile, as President Bush tries to preserve some remnant of decency for America, John Kerry “laughed uproariously” (NY Post) at a Radio City fund raiser that featured a Whoopi Goldberg x-rated rant including, “I Xeroxed my behind, folded it in an envelope and sent it back with a big kiss.” Singer John Mellencamp though it cute to sing that Bush was “just another cheap thug.” Hollywood Democrats, tap-dancing the nation through lies, propaganda, and slime, into the abyss.
Celebrity opinion on The Big Issues has aways been impressive. Who could forget the 1975 Academy Awards right before the surrender of South Vietnam. The award for Best Feature Documentary went to the film Hearts and Minds, a vicious piece of propaganda that attacked American values and our efforts to assist South Vietnam. As that nation was disappearing under a Communist tank onslaught, Bert Schneider, the producer accepting the award, pulled out a telegram from the Viet Cong and read its congratulations. Then Schneider said, “It’s ironic that we are here at a time just before South Vietnam is about to be liberated.” At which time Hollywood’s most powerful people and celebrities rose in a standing ovation, just as they did last week for another vicious piece of propaganda, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. We are just waiting for Hollywod to tell us the terrorists are liberators.
VIETNAM VET GROUPS URGED TO JOIN
Said Mr. Magruder, “The North Carolina interview helped to defeat the Kansas media cover-up, nontheless I will continue in my campaign. I will take my sign to Topeka and parade it at the newspaper there. If that fails, I will take it to Kansas City. If that fails I will just keep going. As we move toward Washington to place this issue before Congress, as newspaper after newspaper rejects the story and the rejection is reported to the whole world through our press releases, the cover-up will become obvious.
Offers to help are already coming in, and we urge all the Vietnam vet groups that have been with us for so many years to make the same sign, “Stop the Media Cover-Up for Kerry”, go tell a reporter what you are going to do, then parade it in front of your local newspaper, individually or with a group, on the same day that I will be protesting in Topeka—Tuesday, July 20, 2004 (at 2 p.m.). Print this article out and make copies to hand out. How hard is that? All we need is one article in a newspaper and it will go around the world. We don’t even need that. Just tell me you did it and that goes out as a story. Even a small number of vets carrying such a sign and being ignored by the media would cause an uproar and help expose the cover-up.
During the Vietnam era the national media robbed the American people of the ability to make critical judgments about their most vital national security interests in a time of war. Now they are trying this again, in the case of John Kerry, suppressing all mention of his repeated radical leftist actions over the years. Media people say, “that was long ago.” But as late as 1987, Kerry, speaking at Yale, continued to charge that U.S. policy in Vietnam was “tantamount to genocide,” and on Meet the Press said again, as he did in 1971, that our soldiers were guilty of “all kinds of atrocities” and branded America’s leaders as “war criminals.” Asked why so many Communists were in his movement, he said that that was not “relevant.”
Anyone who was so clearly a member of the left, Communist-sympathizing, wing of the anti-war movement of the 60’s absolutely has an obligation to explain to the nation how he feels about these matters now.
Then there is that matter of a discussion by V.V.A.W. (Vietnam Veterans Against The War) members in Kansas City about assassinating U.S. Senators. Kerry says he was not there. John Musgrave, a distinguished Vietnam veteran and friend who lives down the road in Baldwin, says he was. The failure of the media to pose questions about these matters to him is totally irresponsible and partisan.
He is definitely the same old Kerry. He championed a nuclear freeze in the 80’s in oppposition to Reagan’s peace-through-strength stance which ended the Cold War. He lent his name to aid Communist guerrillas in El Salvador and Nicaragua. His voting record on defense is appalling. In a foreign policy address only last December Kerry pledged that if elected he will abandon the president’s war on terror and begin a dialogue with the terrorists, demonstrasting a total ignorance of the nature of the enemy. He recently made statements that badly damaged the student pro-democracy movement in Iran. His wife has a track record of massive support for the causes of radical, anti-American groups, including Islamists such as the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) with links to the terrorist group Hamas. The Center for Security Policy has rated Kerry among the worst when it comes to national security. In 1997 he scored exactly zero. The media is allowing no discussion on any of these matters. Kerry is the media’s “stealth” candidate.
But there is much more at stake here. They hope to sneak him in to vindicate their left/liberal version of the Vietnam War. But the Kerry candidacy, having inadvertently raised once again the whole question of the Vietnam War is giving the nation a chance to end once and for all not only the lies Kerry told to Congress about American soldiers, but also the lies about the war that the left has told to students for 40 years. The university and the media tell America the debate was over long ago and the left won. But those who fought the war say, “It’s nowhere near over.”
During the Democratic Convention, July 26-29, there will be a major conference under the auspices of The RADIX Foundation, Steve Sherman, Program Manager, at Simmons College in Boston, “Examining the Myths of the Vietnam War.” Major figures from all over the country will re-examine what the media and the university still teach about the Vietnam War. We quote from the introduction:
“The Kerry Presidential Campaign has brought renewed attention to the Vietnam War and re-opened, in a national spotlight, a debate which has been fairly quiet for several decades. This forum is being offered as an opportunity to give voice to those of us who feel that the history of our war is being mis-portrayed by a culture that prefers to victimize the veteran rather than acknowledge that the culture itself was in the wrong.”
For more information or to sign up go to www.viet-myths.net. While this conference in not meant to be an attack on Kerry, it is certainly inevitable that in the course of the examination a lot of what Kerry has said will be shown to be false. What everyone will be watching for is whether the media will report honestly on the conference. If it does, a huge monkeywrench may be thrown into the campaign.
The terrible impact of the lies about the Vietnam War told by the campus and media upon the returned veterans, made worse by the lies of John Kerry before Congress in 1971, may be seen in our documentary, How the Campus Lied About Vietnam, one hundred and twenty copies of which have been distributed to universites and high schools throughout the nation. A definitive expose of the lies told by Kerry in his 1971 testimony before Congress may be found in an article under Special Features by John Moore, “Kerry to the Senators, 1971,” on wintersoldier.com. This is the best-documented, most comprehensive and scholarly websource of information we have on Kerry’s unfitness to be President.
At this same site, in an article “Psychologists on Kerry,” we said, “The main question for everyone concerning Kerry is whether he is capable of handling the terrorists. Does he even understand what that is all about? Has he studied Islam, the root of the problem? We have never heard him even mention the word.”
Joe Mowbray in a recent article in FrontPageMag said: “In his speech announcing the selection of John Edwards as his VP pick, prehaps the most important news was what Kerry didn’t say. Not one mention of the enemy we are fighting, or how he plans to lead us in that fight. And not only did Kerry not mention Iraq, he didn’t even utter the words ‘al Queda’ or ‘radical Islam.’ Nor did ‘terror’ or ‘terrorism’ pass through his lips. His sole line relating to anything international suggests that Kerry would like to return to the failed foreign policy that helped create the world before 9/11. Kerry mostly talked about overcrowded schools, good-paying jobs, socialized health care, too many prisons, and expanding Head Start.” All this is irrelevant if you lose the country.
Negotiation, dialogue, appeals to the U.N., coalitions with other nations, compromise, even appeasement, are Kerry’s characteristic approaches to conflict. These are the typical tools of a liberal, 20th century diplomat in dealing with reasonably civilized nations. They would prove utterly useless in light of 9/11 and an enemy that has repeatedly said, “We will offer America no chance to come to an agreement, no possibility for compromise, no hope for a treaty, no attempt for solution.”
The only possible response to such a declaration is the threat of utter destruction.
For Bush to win this election all he has to do is publicly warn the terrorists of a new addition to the Bush Doctrine, a plan for instant, massive, terrifying retaliation. He would do this. Kerry would not. Therein you see the catastrophe the nation is headed for if Kerry wins. Let’s all get out there and stop him!
LATEST PRESIDENTIAL POLL RESULTS, VIETNAM VETS.
This is an ongoing poll. Please send any data to Magruder44@aol.com. Results as of July 10, 2004:
GROUPS WITH DATA
§ 6 Vietnam vets this weekend at HS reunion, all oppose Kerry. Dan Haney - 602nd Air Commando Sq. A1 pilot ’67
§ Out of 45 Vietnam veterans... all say pooh on JFK...100%. powmiavets
§ Our heli-vets pol shows 160 against and 6 for Kerry. Ron Leonard, 25th Aviation Battalion
§ I know about 650 Vietnam vets and their attitude toward about Kerry is 100% negative. Dan Decker, TSgt. USAF (ret.)
§ I know thousands of vets .I would say the opinion is about 98% against Kerry. Tony Cartlidge-Vietnam Combat Marine, 1968
§ Of 27 Vietnam Veterans I know, including myself, not one is willing to vote for John Kerry. Charles Banto, USMC 1958-1974
§ 100,000 e-mails, almost all veterans, around 100 to 1 against Kerry. Don Bendell, Special Forces, Vietnam, 1968-69, noted author
§ Out of 25 guys, 90% against Kerry. Mike- mleonardos
§ 240 vets, mostly Vietnam, 85% against Kerry. Tony Newcomb, Cpt.U.S.Army (ret.)
§ Of the more than 2500 veterans of all ranks who responded, 59 took umbrage with what I had to say (against Kerry). Mark A. Smith, former POW, Vietnam
§ An ongoing poll, with names and comments at 11thcavnam.com is running 16 for Bush, 4 for Kerry (80% for Bush.)
§ 12 Vietnam vets, all of whom are against John Kerry. Vietnam vet, Tom Taylor
§ I’d make the numbers 80 to 20 against Kerry. Philip Topps, Cpt. Inf.(ret), 1st Inf. Div. 69-70
§ 100 against Kerry - 0 for him. Storrs Warinner- Vietnam veteran
§ Bush 2115 (88%) - Kerry 275 (12%) - viperaqsh50
§ A summary of individual votes sent in to V.V.A.R. is running 16 for Bush, 3 for Kerry.
GROUPS WITH NO DATA
§ Every vet we know is opposed to Kerry. Chuck and Mary Schantag, P.O.W. Network
§ Rangers are 100% against Kerry. NOATLMUS44 - President
§ Every veteran I’ve talked to is against Kerry. Major General Carl Schneider (ret.), Air Force, Korea and Vietnam
§ I am anti-Kerry, as are most of my friends who are Vietnam veterans. Stud 369
§ I share the distrust I hear from my veteran colleagues. Peter McHugh, CW4 USA, ’67-’68 ,’71-’72
§ I would say 90% of the military here (power plant) are against Kerry. P.Rein
§ 99.5% against Kerry - at www.paltalk.com
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Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
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