Paul O'Neill is the real deal. His critics... well, they're another deal
Quoted from "Vietnam vet questions Kerry on war record," By Jerry Schwartz, Associated Press

"Critics have rebutted O'Neill and Corsi's accusations and charged that the campaign surrounding the book is orchestrated by President Bush's people. They dismiss O'Neill as a Republican stooge, citing his donations to GOP candidates and his law firm's ties to Republicans.

But Gerry Birnberg, chairman of the Harris County Democratic Committee in Houston, has known O'Neill more than 20 years, and while he believes O'Neill is wrong about Kerry, he does not see a Republican plot. O'Neill simply "has intense personal antipathy" for Kerry, he says.

Things Kerry did and said in 1971 "stick in John's craw," he says.

Both Kerry and O'Neill were decorated in Vietnam - the Navy says O'Neill received three Bronze Stars - and both commanded swiftboat No. 94 at different times.

But Kerry is a product of Yale; O'Neill, of the U.S. Naval Academy, where his father (a retired rear admiral), two brothers and 15 other relatives had graduated. Kerry spent 10 months in Vietnam, including six on a frigate offshore; O'Neill was there for 18.

Returning from Vietnam, Kerry got an early discharge to run for Congress and joined the anti-war movement. O'Neill came back to work for the Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps at the College of Holy Cross.

Hospitalized for an injury exacerbated in Vietnam, O'Neill watched Kerry tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the war was foolhardy and recount stories by other veterans about how they had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads."

O'Neill believed in the war effort, thought immediate withdrawal would abandon prisoners of war and was outraged by Kerry's war crime reports.

When the Foreign Relations Committee didn't respond to his offer to rebut Kerry (blogger note: my emphasis), he contacted Bruce Kesler, an ex-Marine who had written a New York Times op-ed piece supporting the war.

Kesler invited him to a Washington news conference for the new Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace.

He was "a young guy like ourselves, very sweet and straight, a Midwestern sort of guy ... ," Kesler recalls. "He had one suit, which was going out of style even then, a blue-and-white seersucker. And he wore white socks."

That day, O'Neill gave a speech that drew notice from the Nixon administration, alarmed by Kerry's increasing star power.

Kerry "was very articulate, a credible leader of the opposition. He forced us to create a counterfoil," Nixon aide Chuck Colson once said, reported Joe Klein in The New Yorker. "We found a vet named John O'Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. We had O'Neill meet the president, and we did everything we could do to boost his group."

Kesler and O'Neill deny the White House instigated their effort. Kesler says Nixon might have exploited his group but didn't create or fund it.

O'Neill visited Nixon for an hour. He remembers they talked of Vietnam, Kerry and politics. He also recalls Nixon's awkward pause when O'Neill said he supported Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

Tapes show he told Nixon that he had been in Cambodia with his swiftboat - though he has since denied it, and has called Kerry's claims of being in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968 "complete lies."

Two weeks after meeting Nixon, O'Neill debated Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show."

"You obviously are quite good on the polished rhetoric, but I did serve in the same place you did ... and I never saw anything," O'Neill said, "and I would like you to tell me about the war crimes you saw committed there, and also why you didn't do something about them."

Kerry insisted there were violations of the Geneva Conventions and said O'Neill's group should be named "Vietnam Veterans for a Continued War."

After a speaking tour and appearance at the 1972 Republican National Convention, O'Neill entered the University of Texas law school, graduated first in his class and clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. He married, had two kids and practiced law, often pressing security fraud cases against brokerages.

He describes his political involvement as minimal. He says he voted for Al Gore in 2000, has given $7,000 to Republicans in recent years but also $20,000 to Democratic candidates for Houston mayor and councilman.

But at age 58, he joined the effort to derail the candidacy of the man he debated at age 25. Others in what became Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had been researching Kerry's record since January; O'Neill and Corsi wrote their book in May and June.

Rolled out with hard-hitting television spots, the book has 650,000 copies in print.

For the second time, O'Neill is being pilloried as a puppet of a Republican president. He is again in a debate involving Vietnam, a war that ended in 1975 and yet may never end.

"I hope that's not true," he says. "I hope we can all forget about it."
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But not, Mr. O'Neill, until we settle John Kerry's nasty hash once and for all (politically speaking - I hope that one day he retires to France or some other country, and has all the nuance, socialisme et fromage he can choke down).

We don't need Kerry's sort in the White House, because as a Cajun I can say with no fear of contradiction that Hanoi John is also plein de merde.

Thanks for standing up and doing the right thing, especially knowing that the band of hypocrites whose baton the Democratic Party waves will bend every effort to smear your reputation.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.