However, this year’s choice was simple: John O'Neill, head of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. O'Neill has spent more than 30 years with one goal: rehabilitating the image of Vietnam veterans, living and dead, slandered by antiwar agitators like John Kerry and their Hollywood sycophants. ...

[I]t was not lies of excessive heroism that spurred the Swift Boat Vets into action: it was lies about their heroism which Kerry converted into a sordid tale of ravaging the countryside "in a fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan" (which the Boston Brahmin sophomorically pronounced "Jen-jis Khan"). The discredited Winter Soldier hearings, which Kerry took part in along with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, painted Vietnam vets as a group of baby-killers who believe napalm "smells like victory." Cashing in on the rising "antiwar" (and often pro-Communist) campus movement, he outflanked the most extreme claims of American atrocities with alleged "eyewitness testimony" in the hopes of riding the discontent to the House of Representatives.

He then pretended to throw his medals away ... without actually doing so.

After claiming he personally witnessed and committed atrocities while in Vietnam, he claimed his memory was "seared, seared" by spending Christmas Eve on the Cambodian border ... a lie pressure from the Swift Boat Vets caused him to retract.

O'Neill believed such a man had no business acting as commander in chief of the military, particularly while a new generation of young men waged a war in Iraq Kerry did not appear to understand, much less support. In keeping such a man of this confused outlook out of the Oval Office, O'Neill did a greater service to those who support our War on Terror than we, mercifully, will ever know.

Human Events has also named O'Neill its man of the year.

"The truth was on his side and he never stinted from speaking it. While O'Neill routinely placed himself in the line of media fire, Kerry refused to give interviews on the subject, preferring instead for the liberal press to attack O'Neill on his behalf.

"And attack they did," Sean Hannity writes for the magazine, citing as a few examples PBS, CNN's ranting James Carville and MSNBC's name-calling Lawrence O'Donnell.

"He risked his life for the cause of freedom in Vietnam, and back home he risked all he had built in a 30-year career to advance the cause of truth."

Editor's note: