Swift Boat Vets Ready Anti-McCain Campaign

“He’s no hero,” declared Tom Mitchell, head of the Swift Boat Veterans Committee, at a hastily arranged press conference to announce a campaign to declare presumptive Republican Presidential candidate John McCain “Not really that fit for service.”

“We can’t have a guy using an obviously fake Vietnam War record to get into the White House,” Mitchell told reporters. “Our financial support base of shadowy hyper-conservative Texas real estate investors will allow us to take our flimsy, unsupportable case directly to the American people. If they can’t decide between truth and fiction, it’s their problem.”

In 2004, the Swift Boat Veterans’ attacks against Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry, according to many observers, may have cost him the election, even though the attacks on Kerry’s war record had no basis in fact.

“McCain claims to have spent years as a POW inside a North Vietnamese prison camp nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton,” Mitchell said. “But we have documentary evidence showing that McCain was actually staying at the real Hanoi Hilton. We have his hotel bill, room service records, and minibar accounts to prove it.”

When asked whether the Swift Boat Veterans were motivated by boredom, lack of regard for historical truth, bitterness, and a desire to “get hot more chicks by being on YouTube and FaceBook,” Mitchell heatedly denied the charges.

“We are a legitimate protest group,” Mitchell said, “and we represent the 37 percent of the American public to whom facts mean absolutely nothing. And we’re not all right wingers, either. That 37 percent includes the entire editorial board of the New York Times.”

When asked about the sworn testimony of dozens of decorated veterans who placed McCain in the Hanoi prison camp, Mitchell replied, “The 2004 campaign shows that the American people, confronted with absolute falsehoods repeated often enough, will swallow anything whole. McCain spent the war in a hotel room, not a bamboo cage. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.”

A spokesman for the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, Le Duc Tran, was baffled by the Swift Boat Veterans’ claims about McCain. “I personally beat the crap out of the Senator at least twice a month,” Mr. Tran recalled.