In endorsing President George W. Bush's reelection, MSNBC analyst and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan called the war in Iraq “the worst strategic blunder in our lifetime,” for which “Bush, his War Cabinet, and the neoconservatives who plotted and planned this war for a decade bear full responsibility.” Yet Buchanan justified his endorsement of the president in part by falsely attacking Senator John Kerry's post-Vietnam War activism.

Buchanan's endorsement appeared in the November 8 issue of the biweekly conservative magazine The American Conservative, of which he is founder and editor. The right-wing news site WorldNetDaily.com posted a condensed version on October 25.

From Buchanan's endorsement of Bush:

The only compelling argument for endorsing Kerry is to punish Bush for Iraq. ... But a vote for Kerry is more than just a vote to punish Bush. It is a vote to punish America.

For Kerry is a man who came home from Vietnam to slime the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and POWs he left behind as war criminals who engaged in serial atrocities with the full knowledge of their superior officers. His conduct was as treasonous as that of Jane Fonda and disqualifies him from ever being commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.

As Media Matters for America has repeatedly pointed out, Kerry did not “slime” anybody in his 1971 testimony before the Senate foreign relations committee. Rather, he related the personal experiences of other Vietnam veterans who came home and testified to their personal experiences at the Winter Soldier Investigation hearing in Detroit earlier that year, which was organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Kerry, who testified in his capacity as spokesman for VVAW, focused blame on the leaders at that time -- not the soldiers -- for the atrocities the soldiers claimed to have committed or witnessed. This is not the first time Buchanan has falsely accused Kerry of “sliming” his fellow veterans in 1971, as MMFA has documented.

Buchanan also invoked the frequently used right-wing tactic of seeking to discredit Kerry by linking him to actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda. But as noted in a February 12 article on CNN.com, “Kerry aides said he did not support Fonda's [1972] trip to [North] Vietnam,” and Fonda “said that she does not recall meeting Kerry during the antiwar movement.” Fonda remarked: “Any attempts to link Kerry to me and make him look bad with that connection is completely false. We were at a rally for veterans at the same time. I spoke, [actor] Donald Sutherland spoke, John Kerry spoke at the end. I don't even think we shook hands.”

American Conservative has been published biweekly since October 2002. According to a statement on its website, the magazine's mission is “to ignite the conversation that conservatives ought to have engaged in since the end of the Cold War, but didn't.”