BUCHANAN: All right, let me ask you, Lawrence O‘Donnell, clearly, Kerry has expressed anger about these ads. And he said later, I should have answered them earlier in August, and we didn‘t do it, and it clearly hurt.

But Max Cleland was very public. He went down to Crawford, Texas, to the ranch. Why has Kerry not only ignored the ads, but almost dropped all references? You know, at the convention was the controversy, John Kerry reporting for duty. Why has he dropped all of that now? Are they just trying to sweep that aside or what?

LAWRENCE O‘DONNELL, MSNBC SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, let‘s get back to the truth. The fact of the matter is that John O‘Neill on MSNBC had to face—debate an argument with Kerry‘s bands of brothers people who served with him in Vietnam and knew him well, and plenty of the people who served on that boat with him have come on MSNBC and other networks and refuted much of what‘s in that book.

And then John O‘Neill‘s own sources, like Larry Thurlow, turned out to be nuts. He turned out to claim in John O‘Neill‘s book—and Pat Buchanan and I have both written nonfiction books, and we write them to a very high standard, not this O‘Neill standard, where he never tells you in his book that Thurlow got a Bronze Star for the same thing that Kerry got a Bronze Star for, the same encounter with the enemy. And that citation says that there was enemy fire.

And the guy, and this Thurlow, who received this Bronze Star, wants us to believe that 35 years had passed and he had never read the words on his own citation. It‘s one of the many lies that the book advances. To me, the most interesting lie, John O‘Neill, that I would submit to you that you should is, you make a lying claim that John Kerry‘s anti-war activity prolonged the amount of time that prisoners of war were held in Vietnam.

You know the truth is what got them out of Vietnam was ending the war. You know the truth is that John Kerry helped end that war sooner through the protests. And I‘d like to ask you, John O‘Neill, when you got back from Vietnam, what did you do to save a single life that you left behind in Vietnam? What did you do to get the American soldiers out of Vietnam?

O‘NEILL: I would like to respond. First of all, Larry, I don‘t think there‘s a thing you said that wasn‘t a lie in everything you just said. To start off with, with respect to John Kerry, John Kerry‘s anti-war activities didn‘t get any POWs home. The Treaty of Paris got the POWs home.

O‘DONNELL: Ending the war, which you didn‘t do a thing to do. You didn‘t have the courage to lift a finger against it.

BUCHANAN: Look, he has got a right to respond. I was in the White House at the time. Nixon had brought half the troops home by the time Kerry made his protest.

O‘NEILL: What actually happened, Kerry wanted to abandon ship and leave the POWs there. We negotiated a treaty that brought them home. That‘s why they‘re all here. If Kerry had helped them out, they wouldn‘t be in that photograph with us. Kerry‘s a guy they‘ll never forget. He wanted to leave them behind.

O‘DONNELL: That‘s a lie, John O‘Neill. Keep lying. It‘s all you do.

BUCHANAN: Hold it, John O‘Neill. How do you justify the—how do you justify the statement you just made that Kerry wanted to leave the POWs behind?

O‘DONNELL: Lies. He doesn‘t justify anything.

BUCHANAN: Where did he do that?

O‘NEILL: On the Dick Cavett show and elsewhere, John Kerry‘s position was that we should accept the Madame Binh seven-point proposal, which called for unilateral withdrawal, setting a date after which at some future time, we‘d negotiate the return of the POWs.

So we would set a date. We would withdraw and then we would begin to discuss how to bring them home. That would have never worked. Our position was, you had to have a deal where the POWs came home. The POWs know that. This is like trying to claim—that‘s why they‘re all with us, because he would have let them rot in jails.

O‘NEILL: With respect to the rest of what you said, Larry...

O‘DONNELL: What did you do to end the war? What did you do to get them out? What did you do to end the war? You didn‘t lift a finger.

O‘NEILL: Oh, you‘re wrong. You‘re exactly wrong, Larry. First of all, I spent 12 months there. I wasn‘t a fake who spent three months, like John Kerry.

O‘DONNELL: What did you do to end the war, not what you did to fight it?

BUCHANAN: Lawrence, you‘ve asked that. You‘ve asked it six times.

O‘NEILL: Then I debated John Kerry, Larry. I debated him on television. I proved he was lying. And John Kerry went home in 1971.

O‘DONNELL: One sentence about what you did to end it. What did you do to end the illegal American war in Vietnam? One sentence.

BUCHANAN: All right, let me give you something, my friend. The illegal war in Vietnam, we were taken into it by John F. Kennedy and by Lyndon Baines Johnson. When Nixon came into office, we had 535,000 people there, and John Kerry was sent there by Lyndon Johnson. If it was illegal, it was your party that did it.

O‘DONNELL: Nixon continued the illegal war for no reason. He won nothing. The peace plan he got he could have gotten on the first day of his presidency.

BUCHANAN: Let me get a specific point here. And, John O‘Neill, the Thurlow question, now, I‘m familiar with this. This was the incident in the river. Now, Thurlow did get a Bronze Star, and the Bronze Star did say...

O‘DONNELL: Which is not in John O‘Neill‘s book, because it‘s a lie.

BUCHANAN: Hold it. It‘s all there. Look, but he got a Bronze Star, and it did say he took fire. My understanding is, he got the Bronze Star a couple of months later, that it came to him, and it did say he took fire. Thurlow does now say that after the explosion in the river, they fired into the bank for 45 seconds or something, and when they got no return fire, no fire at all, they stopped, and they rescued that other boat. Now, how does Thurlow answer the question Larry raises about what‘s on his Bronze Star citation?

O‘NEILL: Well, here‘s what Thurlow says. Thurlow says that, as everyone has said and as Kerry has admitted, he left the scene. He didn‘t stick around. He left the scene and came back. The question is, when he finally came back, was there fire? There are 11 different people, including all four officers, not just Thurlow, and seven enlisted men who say there was no fire.

But, understand, when Kerry came back and picked up Rassmann, he had stayed in exactly the same place. They all did for an hour and a half. There‘s not a bullet hole in any of the boats. Nobody was wounded. This is a 75-yard-wide canal.

BUCHANAN: Tell me, John, about—did not the citation Thurlow got say that they were taking fire?

O‘NEILL: It said under fire. That‘s true. It was based upon Kerry‘s own after-action report.

O‘DONNELL: That‘s a lie. It‘s another lie. That‘s a lie.

O‘NEILL: Which said there had been 5,000 meters of fire.

O‘DONNELL: Absolutely lie. You lie in that book endlessly claiming that reports belonged to Kerry that don‘t have his name on it, John O‘Neill. You lie about documents endlessly. His name is not on the reports. You‘re just lying about it. And you lied about Thurlow‘s Bronze Star. You lied about it as long as you could until “The New York Times” found the wording of what was on the citation that you, as a lying writer, refused to put in your pack-of-lies book. Disgusting, lying book.

BUCHANAN: John, let me ask you this.

O‘NEILL: And you, Larry, are a professional liar.

O‘DONNELL: You have no standards, John O‘Neill, as an author. And you know it. It‘s a pack of lies. You are unfit to publish.

O‘NEILL: There are 254 of us, Larry. It‘s a little hard to call us all liars.

BUCHANAN: All right, John O‘Neill, let me ask you a quick question. How do you know for certain that John Kerry wrote the after-action report that said the boats were under fire?

O‘NEILL: It has been tracked down specifically in...

O‘DONNELL: Lies.

BUCHANAN: Oh, let him talk.

O‘DONNELL: He just lies. He just spews out lies. Point to his name on the report, you liar. Point to his name, you liar. These are military records. Point to a name.

O‘NEILL: I will, if you‘ll shut up, Larry. You can‘t just scream everybody down.

O‘DONNELL: There‘s no name. You just spew lies.

O‘NEILL: ... let everybody talk, isn‘t...

BUCHANAN: Look, Lawrence, take it easy. You‘ve made your point. We‘re going to take a break. We‘re going to give John O‘Neill a chance to answer that when we come back. We‘ll continue this discussion after the break. [...] We have an e-mail, Lawrence, that says: “Why is Mr. O‘Donnell so angry? In fact, why are Democrats so angry? If they don‘t calm themselves down, they‘re going to have a heart attack.”

O‘DONNELL: I just hate the lies of John O‘Neill. I hate lies.

BUCHANAN: I know. Now, you‘ve argued that these are lies, but let me suggest...

O‘DONNELL: It‘s not an argument. They‘re proven lies. Every single journalistic look at this book has ripped it apart, left it in shreds. O‘Neill is a liar. He‘s been a liar for 35 years about this. And he found other liars to...

BUCHANAN: Why cannot John Kerry‘s band of brothers and Max Cleland come on and take this...

O‘DONNELL: They have come on. They have told you. Every single person who served with John Kerry...

BUCHANAN: I‘ve gone through every single incident.

O‘DONNELL: O‘Neill never served with them, never met them until Vietnam. Everybody who was on that boat with Kerry says all of this stuff is a lie.

BUCHANAN: Why have none of them signed the sworn affidavits that admirals and others have signed?

O‘DONNELL: Those affidavits have no legal meaning. They are fraudulent.

BUCHANAN: They‘re fraudulent? Twenty people got up and lied and signed their name to it?

O‘DONNELL: Yes. Because some of those people have signed their names to reports that say John Kerry‘s conduct in Vietnam was exemplary, reports written at the time. You can‘t sign both documents. They are lying somewhere.

O‘NEILL: Can I say one thing?

BUCHANAN: John O‘Neill, go ahead, John.

O‘NEILL: Pat, Mr. O‘Donnell has certainly shown he has a good pair of lungs. But to try and return a little bit to just basic information, you asked the question, how do we know the report was written by Kerry? The first way we know that is that the other four officers that day, all four of them, say Kerry wrote it.

The second way we know it is the journalist Tom Lipscomb tracked the report to a Coast Guard cutter and proved that the only one on the cutter to write the report was John Kerry. Third, the report is compatible with John Kerry‘s account, which as late as the Democratic Convention.

O‘DONNELL: What are the initials on the report?

BUCHANAN: Let him finish.

O‘NEILL: Mr. O‘Donnell, this is what you all did to the POWs.

O‘DONNELL: Just tell me the initials, you liar.

O‘NEILL: You‘re afraid of the American people getting the truth. That‘s why you scream and you yell.

O‘DONNELL: Creepy liar.

BUCHANAN: Hey, listen, we don‘t need the personal insults to you.

O‘DONNELL: Does that matter to you? They‘re not his initials? Does that matter to you at all?

O‘NEILL: You‘re totally afraid of the truth. Can I speak or you‘re going to yell...

O‘DONNELL: ... liar who makes things up. Does it have his name or his initials on it?

BUCHANAN: It doesn‘t have it on there. You know that.

O‘DONNELL: Does it have someone else‘s initials? Yes. Did you bother to find out who wrote it? No, because you want the lie. That‘s how you make your...

BUCHANAN: Lawrence, you‘re going to have to let him talk. Go ahead, John.

O‘NEILL: I guess, first of all, the American people have seen most clearly the choice they have. They can have people like Mr. O‘Donnell that scream down the POWs, scream me down, or they can try and go on with the orderly administration of government. The second thing to respond directly, what Mr. Lipscomb was able to prove is that Kerry was the only one on the Coast Guard cutter. The third point was that that report is compatible with Kerry‘s story. It says there were 5,000 meters of fire, like the Battle of Gettysburg, but Kerry was the only one who ever said he left the scene and came back. That is what that report reflects.

So there‘s huge evidence that that was Kerry‘s report. He himself, although he sends surrogates out to scream me down, like Mr. O‘Donnell, Kerry himself has never, ever been willing to address directly any of these issues. He‘s remained totally mum on them, other than generalized statements and having his surrogates say, oh, they‘ve discredited. There‘s not a one that has been discredited, Pat.

Source: MSNBC

MSNBC said in a statement that O'Donnell "crossed a line. MSNBC believes he was disrespectful to you, the viewer, and that his insults did nothing to forward the debate or the understanding of a very critical issue. We have spoken to Lawrence O'Donnell, and he agrees."

Except that O'Donnell, who didn't know the statement was coming, doesn't agree. He was "too loud," he admits, in what was "an uncontrollable outburst on my part," and "my manner was everything I hate about cable TV shouting matches." But, O'Donnell says, "I don't apologize for a single word that I said. . . . People have been coming out of the woodwork to tell me how great they thought it was. There's a big 'mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more' contingent out there on this subject that feels I was giving voice to their position."

Source: Washington Post

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