Harkin's hypocrisy is astounding. In 2004 he could not stop lavishing praise about John " I got a splinter" Kerry's military service and how important it was and when faced with someone who was a POW with a family history of honarable military service it is a liability.

So... who is Tom Harkin? Or should that be Komrad Tom Walter Mitty Harkin?

As he has consistently LIED about his military service, so I suppose that qualifies him to lie about John McCain too. Here's a few selected highlights from a 2004 FrontPage expose of Harkin's greatest misses

RECENT HISTORY
During the 2004 presidential race, Harkin initially endorsed leftwing candidate and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean. Two months before the general election, Harkin became an attack dog for Democratic standard-bearer and old comrade John Kerry, who like Harkin voted to authorize war in Iraq but thereafter relentlessly criticized it.

President Bush has "Lied to the American People" about his National Guard service during the Vietnam War, snarled U.S. Senator Tom Harkin at a September 9, 2004 press conference. Swift Boat veterans critical of John Kerry were also liars, Harkin claimed. Vice President Dick Cheney, said Harkin, was “a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War.” And those who brought up Kerry’s anti-war activities in the United States that encouraged the North Vietnamese Communists to continue fighting instead of negotiating peace, said Harkin, represent the “right-wing kooky fringe.”

Yet if anyone is a liar it’s TOM HARKIN…

During his service in the Navy, Harkin told Washington Post reporter David Broder, “One year was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaissance support missions. I did no bombing.”

But as the late Senator Barry Goldwater (R.-Arizona) was first to notice, nothing in Harkin’s military service file showed that he ever served in Vietnam. Challenged by Goldwater, an Air Force General, to explain why he was awarded neither the Vietnam Service Medal nor the Vietnam Campaign medal (decorations given to everyone who served in the Southeast Asian theater), Harkin changed his story. Harkin claimed that he instead had flown combat sorties over Cuba during the 1960s.

This was another Harkin lie. Harkin actually served as a ferry pilot who flew aircraft in need of repair between the Philippines and his base in Atsugi, Japan. Harkin at last acknowledged that he never flew air patrols in Vietnam. He began describing himself in speeches as “a Vietnam era veteran.”

JUST A 1960’S QUASI-MARXIST LEFTIST
In 1969 Harkin began work in the office of longtime Iowa Democratic Congressman Neal Smith, and to supplement his income was given a patronage job at the U.S. Post Office Department. In 1970 Harkin as a staff aide to the House Select Committee on United States Involvement in Southeast Asia accompanied a fact-finding mission to South Vietnam. As part of this mission, during a 30-minute visit to Con Son Prison he snapped photographs of Communist prisoners in “tiger cages.”

When the mission returned, Harkin declared that these photographs were “too important” to be turned over to Congress and to the committee that employed him, paid for his travel and provided him official U.S. Government access to the prison. Harkin instead sold these photos, some to anti-American foreign outlets, and others to Life Magazine for $10,000. (Harkin used this money from selling what ethically was taxpayer-funded government property to pay off his own debts for his 1972 law degree from Catholic University.)

The “tiger cages” story in Life and throughout the anti-war press turned Harkin into an instant star of the left, including the establishment U.S. media. Harkin gave an interview to the Daily World, official newspaper of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), in which he made sweeping attacks on the treatment of prisoners throughout South Vietnam. His statements, based on being an underling who spent 30 minutes walking through one prison, were used in communist propaganda worldwide against the South Vietnamese government and the United States.

During Harkin’s 1982 re-election campaign, his opponent documented that this Democratic congressman had always voted against foreign aid for countries friendly to the U.S., but that Harkin had voted to give taxpayer money to Communist Vietnam, Communist Cuba, Communist Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Marxist Sandinista Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and other Communist nations. When this came up in a broadcast debate, Harkin replied: “From now on, I am going to vote against all foreign aid.”

As a newly-elected Senator, in April 1985 Harkin and fellow neophyte leftwing Senator John F. Kerry (D.-Massachusetts) flew to Nicaragua (on a trip arranged by IPS staff member Peter Kornbluh) to give propaganda support to the Sandinistas only days before a scheduled congressional vote on President Ronald Reagan’s requested aid for Nicaragua’s anti-Communist freedom fighters. After embracing Daniel Ortega in front of news cameras, Harkin and Kerry flew back to Washington with a piece of paper signed by Ortega in which he claimed to be “non-aligned” between the U.S. and Soviet Union.

Harkin, noted reporter Gerard Jackson, during his 1985 mission with John Kerry to rescue the Marxist Sandinistas, urged the editor of Nicaragua’s independent newspaper La Prensa, Violetta Chamorro, “to accept Sandinista censorship.” She bravely refused.

Vote 4 change. Vote 4 anything. See Jack & Mr Shy's first campaign ad for the ONLY viable 3rd party candidate.

Grant's presidency was marred with corruption and scandal. I'm surprised the Republican Party actually survived after him. However, since corruption was commonplace and quite open in the late 1800's, the "everyone is doing it" defense probably helped the party to stay afloat. Grant may well indeed be a worse president than Carter was.

Harkin's rewriting of history is far more dangerous. Here is a video of him getting smacked down by McCain.

http://moneyrunner.b...

Tom Harkin states, "McCain's Military Upbringing Can Be Pretty Dangerous"

Yeah, dufus, to our enemies!

This from Harkin who has been trying for years to cut Rush Limbaugh completely off the air to our military, the same guy who meets with dictators in South America with Kerry, the same guy who stood behind Howard Dean as Dean was kissing his arse good-bye with his Dean Scream in Iowa and Harkin didn't know whether to applaud or cry....yeah Harkin a real rocket scientist at work...a real patriot indeed.

"Never murder your opponent when he is committing suicide." ~ W. Churchill

This man has an ass-backward argument as to what are good and bad qualities in an election for President. Being from a patriotic and Ameriacn loving up-bringing is now to be considered as detrimental? This is absurd with a capital "A"!! Let me add my two cents; I firmly believe that if you are not a Veteran, than you should not be allowed to vote-for anything. If you are a Purple Heart recipient, then you vote is counted twice(if alive). My views are drastic, but Sen. Harkins view is idiotic.