Daily Beast boss John Avlon accuses conservatives of "playing the victim" of liberal bias. Then he goes back to the office and victimizes conservatives. The latest example: a crude piece of mudslinging headlined "The Fallen Heroes Who Went to Vietnam in John Bolton’s Place: They all had the same birthday and same draft number. But while the now-hawkish national security adviser rode out the war in safety, these brave young soldiers never came home."
Above the headline, the Daily Beast put in caps "SACRIFICED."
You won't find a Daily Beast article on "The Fallen Heroes Who Went to Vietnam in Bill Clinton's Place." They could find the men born on August 19, 1946 who died in Vietnam while Clinton dodged the draft at Oxford. But that would be a smear. Liberals like Avlon play this game because Bolton is a hawk, and they feel Clinton is a peace-loving dove...unless conservatives attack him as a dove. Then he's a thoughtful deployer of force.
In 2015, Daily Beast writer Michael Daly used the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination to push for President Michelle Obama. He's that partisan.
This time, Daly began:
Our new national security adviser, John Bolton, was born on the same day in 1948 as Weyman Cook, Jerry Miller, and Richard Lassiter, whose own chances for future achievements ended when they were killed in Vietnam.
Their common birthday was Nov. 20, number 185 in the 1969 draft lottery, which was based on date of birth and ended student deferments—such as the one Bolton had until then enjoyed at Yale. He might well have been called up, as the draft went up to 195, but he managed to get a spot in the Maryland National Guard and then a local Army reserve unit. The Guard and the Reserves had long waiting lists, as they offered a way to avoid being sent to Vietnam.
“I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy,” Bolton wrote in his Yale 25th reunion class book. “I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.”
Instead, Bolton went to Yale Law School, interning in the summer for the stridently pro-war Vice President Spiro Agnew, who told everybody that the fight in Vietnam was progressing far better than the effete media suggested.
Daly ended by pounding phlegmatically on the same note:
Others who were born on Nov. 20, 1948, who died in Vietnam include Heinrich Ruhlmann, Leonard Deinlein, Jorge Luis Mendez-Matos, and Rene Buller.
And John Bolton lives on to become our new super-hawk national security adviser. Neither he nor his office responded on Monday to a request for comment about a time when he faced actually being in a war.
Maybe he was too busy in the first official day of his latest achievement in a future such as was violently denied those other young men born on Nov. 20, 1948.
“They never got a chance,” Richard Lassiter’s sister, Pauline, told The Daily Beast.
Daly's been working out of a slime bucket for quite a while. As a columnist at the New York Daily News in 2011, he wrote "Gabrielle Giffords' Blood Is On Sarah Palin's Hands". He added "Palin might as well have said 'Fire!'"
