posted November 15, 2004 09:34 PM            

Annie Taylor was the first woman to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive. It is a fitting award for American heroes who were slandered and defamed while they were being tortured in Communist prisons by an American traitor who almost became president, and who were defamed and slandered again by a left-wing American media that have done what they could to undermine America's commander in chief in the middle of the battle and defeat us in the war on terrorism.

The honorees were introduced by my friend Wally Nunn, a helicopter gunner in Vietnam who told me 20 years ago when we first met that even though "anti-war" activists like myself stabbed him and his comrades in the back while they were on the front lines, he bore no grudge because the reason he was in Vietnam was to defend the freedoms that included our right to dissent.

Wally introduced Carleton Sherwood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who made “Stolen Honor” and who was wounded three times in Vietnam. Sherwood recounted his dismay at the way the left-wing media – the AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. – ran interference for the traitor and liar Kerry, obscured what he had done and repeated their own criminal assault on the American heroes who died for their freedom in Vietnam.

The next two awards were presented by Col. Jack Jacobs, MSNBC commentator and a Congressional Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam. Jack is five feet four. Unlike Kerry, he didn't write his own citation and so he couldn't fake the record of what he had done. While shot in the head, Jack Jacobs carried 22 wounded soldiers to safety across a fire zone.

Every life he saved was that of a Vietnamese. Jack was the leader of a platoon of South Vietnamese soldiers fighting to protect themselves and their families from the horrors that followed the Communist victory that Kerry and his patron Ted Kennedy and Jane Fonda and other leftists worked so hard to accomplish.

The presence of Jack Jacobs was in itself an indictment of the traitor Kerry and the left-wingers in the AP, at the New York Times and the Washington Post who aided and abetted him. For he was one of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnam soldiers who risked and gave their lives for the freedom of us and the Vietnamese and whom Kerry and the left slandered as "war criminals."

Jacobs introduced Jim Warner, who was shot down near the DMZ with his co-pilot, who broke his leg in their fall. Warner was forced by the Communists to carry his comrade 700 miles to the prison in North Vietnam, where the Communists tortured him for five years before he was released.

While Warner was being tortured, John Kerry and his fellow traitors manipulated Warner's mother to testify before Jane Fonda's Winter Soldier Investigation, a collective perjury organized to help the enemy win the war. In “Stolen Honor” there is actual footage, retrieved by Carlton Sherwood, that shows the leftists who staged the Winter Soldier Investigation making up their tales.

The Winter Soldier Investigation was designed to produce the anti-American propaganda that Jim Warner and his fellow POWS braved torture not to give their captors.

Warner told the Restoration Weekend audience that with the defeat of the traitor Kerry at the polls the last mission of the Vietnam War had been completed.

Warner was followed by John O'Neill, the man who pursued Kerry for 30 years, until justice was done. O'Neill pointed out that not a single one of the vets involved in the truth campaign was political in any sense of the word. The extent of their political activities was to try to expose Kerry's lies in 1971 and save the Vietnamese and Cambodians from the mass slaughter that Kerry and Kennedy and Fonda were working so hard to make possible, and then to prevent him from becoming president, a position from which he could facilitate more defeats at the hands of our enemies in the war on terror.

I was riveted to the screen when C-SPAN replayed the O'Neill-Kerry debate of 1971. One moment in particular was seared into my consciousness. It was when the subject of a possible "bloodbath" came up if America left the war as Kerry wanted. Kerry dismissed the idea. Only a few thousand might be killed and those would be Vietnamese guilty of war crimes, he insinuated. John O'Neill knew better. There would be a bloodbath of tens of thousands of innocents, he said (in fact, it turned out to be millions).

How did O'Neill know this? Because he knew that the Communists were Communists, and their deeds at Hue and elsewhere showed exactly what they would do. In contrast, Kerry portrayed them as Vietnamese patriots, exactly the way Michael Moore portrays the Zarqawi terrorists in Iraq today.

These are the voices of treason. If listened to, they will get many more tens of thousands – both Iraqis and Americans – killed. This is the treacherous voice that the so-called liberals in Hollywood and in the press have done everything they could to support and abet.

These are dangerous and immoral times. The Swift Boat vets have gone to battle for us once again, and have prevailed. But at great personal cost. John O'Neill is a lawyer. One the members of my board of directors who was present at the Weekend told me how he first heard of John O'Neill when one of the companies on whose boards he sits (he is an investor) was looking for a corporate lawyer in Houston to represent them. John O'Neill was recommended as the most honest straight shooter in Houston, someone with an impeccable reputation for integrity.

By leaving the private sector and entering the political arena for the first time in 30 years to challenge a traitor and a liar in this last mission of the Vietnam War, John O'Neill has had to brave a free-fire zone of slander and libel such as few have had to endure. He has been defamed and abused by every major media institution (with the exception of Fox) in this country.

Michael Parks, former editor of the L.A. Times and now the dean of the Journalism School at UCLA – a man of the left whom I used to respect and who reported from Moscow during the height of the Cold War – wrote a character assassination posing as a review for the L.A. Times about John's book that was worthy of Pravda in the days of Stalin.