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You haven't read up on your swifties in the time since 2004, have you? And the only things you seem to know about John Kerrey are the things you hear from Republican approved media (Fox "Fair and Balanced", the talk shows, maybe) sources. It would be like someone going to the Tanners to learn about Joseph Smith.
Their claims regarding Kerry's medals and other aspects of his conduct while in Vietnam still stand as evidentially substantive and unrefuted, if not directly proven claims, and more importantly, his pivotal role in the Winter Soldier political theater, his friendly liaisons with the North Vietnamese leadership against his own country and in their behalf while the war was still in progress (and while he was still in the navel reserves), and his association with the most extreme anti-American, pro-communist elements of the New Left at the time are historical facts beyond serious argument.
He chose his own path then, and it came back to haunt him, no matter how he tried to sanitize his own history.
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Harry Reid is not doing anything different than a Repub would be doing, if the tables were switched.
Except that no Republican presidential candidate or president in recent memory has or is doing such stuff. This kind of behavior is confined almost exclusively within the Democratic party, which raises serious questions regarding the entire moral condition of that party and the ideology that drives desperate power madness of this kind.
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(The only difference is, you wouldn't be whining about it now, you'd be applauding.)
I'm not a Republican, and not particularly a fan of Mitt Romney. You're already running on fumes.
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You see the "swifties" as having been only telling the truth, doing their patriotic duty, etc., etc., and T. Boone Pickens, who funded the whole thing, as a patriot. Why, because you are a right wing Republican and this is the right wing Republican narrative re: the "swifties". The Democrats, for their part, accept a different narrative. Which narrative you accept depends on what your prejudices are, which party you identify with.
In other words, you don't know what you're talking about, haven't done any substantive reading on the subject, and have nothing to bring to the table but ad hominem circumstantial innuendo.
The head of that group, John O'Neill, a black Vietnam Veteran and lifelong Democrat, debated Kerry in 1971 on the Winter Soldier agitprop and his association with the radical Left. O'Neill started the Swift Vets for Truth, with other vets, many conservative but containing some clear Democrats as well, because Kerry was an utter phony who, like many on the Left at that time, had openly supported and shilled for America's enemies during that war, and had become a legitimate fifth column within America seeking the defeat of the United States and the conquest and subjugation of South Vietnam by the Stalinist North.
Kerry was up passed his ears in this entire culture and ideological stew.
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An intelligent person can look at these two narratives and see them for what they are; not as the "truth", but as two competing narratives. A ideologue sees one or the other as the "truth", the last word.
Yes, that's the standard, formatted, all-purpose postmodern epistemological cop-out. Throw up your hands and run away from the very serious problems posed by stubborn things such as facts, evidence, logical argument, and historical documentation into "narrative" and "text."
You can have it both ways, that way. No, in point of fact, you can have it any way you want it. Nihilism works that way, but like the monkey's paw, it exacts a terrible price for your granted wishes.