Sunday, May 17, 2009

Why Fake Vets?

At Chicago-Boyz, Shannon Love explores why the Dems keep getting tricked by people pretending to be veterans.

If there were a lot of veterans disillusioned with Bush-era policies (now Obama-era policies) why did they find it necessary to rely on a fake vet? If they had dozens or hundreds of real vets ready to sign on to their campaigns what are the odds the most prominent one would be a mentally-ill fraud?

You con someone by playing to their prejudices. Strandlof conned the Democrats by presenting them a fabricated persona and history custom-designed to fit the Democratic narrative. An actor playing a vet scripted to their narrative served their purposes better than a real vet

However, the real reason they didn’t check Strandolf’s creditials is that they didn’t care if he was real or not.


And what is their rational for such deception?

Democrats feel justified in using fake vets because of their utter contempt for the intelligence and wisdom of the electorate. Fake vets are just another version of the “What’s The Matter with Kansas” mindset which holds that most American adults are simply too stupid to understand what is good for them. In this mindset, using fake vets to lie about the American conduct of a war is no more immoral than telling a child that Santa Claus exists.


And it gets worse

The Democrats could easily find veterans who would doubt the wisdom of any particular war or the specific means of conducting a particular war. Why then do they time and time again use fake veterans to front their arguments?

Easy, real veterans won’t lie. In 1971, John Kerry could have found thousands of real Vietnam veterans who believed the war ill conceived and ill fought but he couldn’t find any real Vietnam veterans who would lie about witnessing large numbers of true war crimes. Without fake vets, John Kerry couldn’t make his central argument that the American military in Vietnam had crossed over the line into Nazi-like evil.

John Kerry’s lies eventually got him to within a gnat’s whisker of the Presidency. Younger Democrats have watched the rise of Kerry and others of his generation who lied and they know that deceit not only works but that using it has no negative consequences. For this reason, we will always see fake vets dragged out by Democratic candidates, activists and left-leaning media. They have no reasons, either moral or practical, not to do so.


Of course for this to work, it requires a mass media complict in the deception.

Just imagine what would happen if a Republican used fake vets.

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