Low Points

With the announcement today that the Sinclair Broadcast Group will air an anti-Kerry film just days before the election on its network of 62 nationwide local television channels that include Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, WB and UPN, presidential politics has hit a new low. Unless Kerry confronts Bush directly at the final debate tomorrow, Bush is unlikely to acknowledge or denounce this group of Pennsylvania veterans who are financing the broadcast. He may make the usual remark of respecting Kerry’s service in Vietnam, but unless the Democratic Party’s official complaint is not accepted with the Federal Election Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, which is run by the son of Colin Powell, there may be no way to stop a slanted movie against Kerry from being aired on national television.

The movie focuses on Kerry’s activities as an anti-war protester in the early 1970’s and his appearance before congress in 1971, an act these veterans claim prolonged the war in Vietnam and extended the suffering of POWs in North Vietnamese prison camps. What some Vietnam veterans don’t seem to understand is that the anti-war protests of the late ’60s and early 70’s were a factor in the war ending when it did, and John Kerry was one of many voices that represented that movement. Bringing out into the open atrocities that American soldiers were committing in Vietnam only helped politicians to come to the correct judgement in bringing US forces home when they did. An absence of such protests would have only prolonged the war past 1975, the year the war ended.

It is the absence of such large-scale protests as seen in the late ’60s that could prolong the conflict in Iraq, causing further deaths of innocent Iraqi civilians and American troops. And with a mass media that largely acquiesces to the wishes of the Bush Administration by not showing the true level of chaos in Iraq, the silence will only prolong a conflict that never should have happened in the first place.

Related articles:

Guardian Unlimited
Los Angeles Times (subscription)
Kerry’s appearance before the Committee on Foreign Relations, April 22, 1971