THE KERRY DOSSIER (post here anything you've uncovered on Kerry)

Actress and activist Jane Fonda attends an anti-Vietnam War rally at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The rally was sponsored by Vietnam veterans. John Kerry can be seen directly in the background. 1970 Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, USALeif Skoogfors (CORBIS)

WASH TIMES 2/11 Rep. Sam Johnson, Texas Republican, who spent nearly seven years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam, said yesterday the photograph of Mr. Kerry with Miss Fonda will hurt him nevertheless. "I think it symbolizes how two-faced he is, talking about his war reputation, which is questionable on the one hand, and then coming out against our veterans who were fighting over there on the other," Mr. Johnson said. Mr. Johnson recalled that his North Vietnamese captors played recordings of Miss Fonda telling U.S. troops to give up the war. "Seeing this picture of Kerry with her at antiwar demonstrations in the United States just makes me want to throw up."

FLORIDUH VOTER: Please get this out......would make a nice flyer. It's from BP News. JOHN KERRY IS FOR FEDERAL PROTECTIONS FOR SAME SEX MARRIAGES. Can you say pandering to the Massachusetts constituents but not talking this up around the country?

Kerry: Federal government should recognize state-sanctioned same-sex 'marriage' Mar 4, 2004

By Staff

BOSTON (BP)--Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has told homosexual activists that the federal government should recognize same-sex “marriages” and civil unions that are legalized on the state level, The Washington Post reported March 4.

His position means that the federal government would grant the same 1,000-plus benefits enjoyed by married couples nationwide to same-sex couples -- provided that those couples lives in a state that allows for same-sex “marriage” or civil unions.

Kerry made the pledge at a homosexual fundraiser in San Francisco Feb. 27, the newspaper reported, adding that it is the furthest Kerry has gone in defining his position on same-sex “marriage.”

“[H]e would bestow all federal benefits such as the right to file joint income taxes and collect survivor benefits to same-sex couples who unite legally in civil unions, domestic partnerships and even marriage under their state laws,” The Post reported.

Kerry, who says he personally opposes same-sex “marriage,” has been criticized by homosexual activists for supporting a marriage amendment to the Massachusetts constitution that would ban same-sex “marriage” while legalizing civil unions.

He opposes a federal marriage amendment and was one of only 14 senators in 1996 to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act.

Kerry’s comments at the fundraiser were meant to appease homosexual activists, The Post said.

Kerry is trying to find “middle ground” on same-sex “marriage,” his advisers told the newspaper.

"There were a lot of people who were very upset at the way his position was described," Jeff Soukup, a Kerry supporter who is a homosexual, told The Post. “And there were a lot of people who had been planning to attend the fundraiser who said they would not attend until Kerry clarified his position."

California state Rep. Mark Leno, who has introduced a bill in California that would legalize same-sex “marriage,” was pleased with Kerry’s position.

“It’s the first time in history that a presidential candidate has ever supported full and equal protection for same-sex couples," Leno told the newspaper. “He told me that he would grant all 1,049 federal rights to same-sex couples in whatever legal union their states recognize.”

President Bush backed a constitutional marriage amendment Feb. 24, saying it may be the only way to stop nationalized same-sex “marriage.”

“An amendment to the Constitution is never to be undertaken lightly,” Bush said at the time. “The amendment process has addressed many serious matters of national concern. And the preservation of marriage rises to this level of national importance.”

http://www.bpnews.net/samesexmarriage

Liz, please copy and paste this to the Kerry Dossier. I think this is a significant find because Mr. Flip Flop wants TO GET INTO OUR WALLETS BIG TIME. It also concerns me that gays will marry "in name only" just for the benies, you know, entitlements. We would need means testing of every couple to determine who is and who isn't really in a true marriage; i.e. marriage police to prevent fraud.

KERRY MUST BE DEFEATED.

The Pandescenderer
John Kerry, Mr Anything
by Andrew Sullivan

Here's a word that deserves to be entered into the political lexicon. The blogger Mickey Kaus coined it. It's "pandescender." It stems from John Kerry's remarkable political ability to both pander and condescend to voters at the same time. In a word, it's what's obviously wrong with the Kerry candidacy for president of the United States, and, even in the early post-primary glow of his anointing, is troubling even die-hard Democrats as they confront president Bush in the fall.

Start with the pandering. Over the many years that John Kerry has been in the United States senate, the Democrat from Massachusetts has accumulated an astonishing ability to have been on every side of most issues. There's a polite way of saying this, of course. The Washington Post recently reported that "Kerry's past support for policies he now condemns is complicating his run for the White House, strategists from both parties say, and could prove problematic." Or here's how the editors of the New York Times expressed it: "What his critics see as an inability to take strong, clear positions seems to us to reflect his appreciation that life is not simple."

Well, life isn't simple. But it doesn't have to be as subtly, preternaturally, systematically complex as John Kerry makes it out to be. His dizzyingly complex record has already set him up for the best line George W. Bush has had in months. In his first campaign speech, Bush said he was surveying the field of Democratic candidates and found them very diverse: "They're for tax cuts and against them. They're for NAFTA and against NAFTA. They're for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act. They're in favor of liberating Iraq, and opposed to it. And that's just one senator from Massachusetts."

Bush's line is effective because he has a point. Take a couple of obvious issues in American politics. Affirmative action. As writer Michael Grunwald recently pointed out, in 1992, John Kerry made something of a splash attacking racial preferences as counter-productive and divisive. Kerry worried out loud about whether such racial set-asides encouraged a "culture of dependency." It seemed like a brave statement of the time - from a man willing to challenge Democratic orthodoxy. But almost as soon as he had uttered those words, Kerry backtracked. His current position is blanket support for all affirmative action. His campaign website brags that he has "consistently opposed efforts in the Senate to undermine or eliminate affirmative action programs, and supports programs that seeks to enhance diversity."

On another critical issue, education reform, Kerry once took on the all-powerful teacher's unions whose resistance to weeding out poor teachers and allowing parents greater choice in schools has been a huge drag on improving performance and raising standards. In 1998, he supported giving head teachers more leeway to fire bad teachers, end tenure and allow for real reform. Now, he's once again a tool of the teachers' lobby. His campaign brochure promises to "stop blaming and start supporting public school educators," and to give them "better training and better pay, with more career opportunities, more empowerment and more mentors."

You can point to a long litany of other issues where Kerry has taken one position and then regressed to another. Even in this campaign, he started out as pro-war (he voted for it in the Senate) and then, sensing Howard Dean's appeal, swung against it. In the Senate, he voted for the Iraq war resolution and then against the $87 billion needed to fund the reconstruction. On trade, Kerry's record has been consistently - yes consistently! - in favor of free trade. But as soon as John Edwards' charismatic protectionism seemed to threaten his momentum, Kerry shifted back to talking about "putting teeth" into labor and environment protections in free trade agreements.

People who have been in public life a long time are allowed, of course, to change their minds, to move when new facts emerge or new arguments persuade them. And it is one of George W. Bush's weaknesses that he doesn't seem able to adjust his convictions in the face of empirical evidence that they might need adjusting, changing or fixing. But Kerry goes further than most. And almost all of his adjustments have been in order to serve his immediate political interests rather than to stand up for principle.

All of this is troubling enough - and it's the reason behind George Bush's first round of political ads which were unveiled last week. Their theme is that Bush is steady, firm, principled and reliable. The implication, although Kerry is not mentioned in the ads at all, is that Kerry is none of the above. But Kerry also has a charm problem. He's not, mercifully, Al Gore. He will, I think, be no less formidable a candidate (and it's important to remember that Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote). But he does look and sound aristocratic, even European. He doesn't have the populist Democratic touch of a Howard Dean or a John Edwards or a Bill Clinton. Without his Vietnam veteran appeal, he wouldn't even be close to viability as a candidate. In Massachusetts, it's hard to find anyone who actually likes him - especially among those hacks who have covered him over the years or among the grittier Boston pols who have had to deal with him.

One local hack, Howie Carr, a priceless muck-raking columnist in the down-market Boston Herald, has made a career out of lampooning Kerry's aloofness. On his radio call-in show Carr would field caller after caller relaying various anecdotes (which I cannot independently verify) of how Kerry or his entourage had once pushed to the front of a queue somewhere or wangled himself out of a parking ticket, or ejected someone from a restaurant table, and on and on. Petty, petty stuff. But it accumulates. The noblesse oblige reputation even developed an acronym: DYKWIA syndrome. That's short for "Do You Know Who I Am?" It's not exactly a good slogan for a politician. Especially someone up against a likable chap like Dubya.

Or consider this extract from a recent campaign piece in the Boston Globe, noticed by Kaus, which epitomizes the problem: "Later, Kerry led a question-and-answer forum with workers at a Youngstown manufacturing plant, where the senator drew polite applause at points but also some lengthy silences. He answered seven questions over 27 minutes; three of his answers lasted more than five minutes apiece." Ouch.

Don't get me wrong. I do not believe that Kerry is a doomed candidate. He has fought some very tough campaigns over the years and done so successfully. He has been under-rated before, not least in this campaign. The president has had an awful few months and is in danger of losing critical independent votes, over his muddled defense of the war, his fiscal irresponsibility and his catering to the religious right. And the Democrats have had a relatively cost-free primary season, are energized to beat Bush, and are already neck and neck, if not ahead, in the polls.

But Kerry is not a panacea. The question this year, I suspect, is not ultimately who is going to win this election. The question to be answered between Kerry and Bush is rather who will be more effective in losing it.

March 6, 2004, Sunday Times of London.
copyright © 2000, 2004 Andrew Sullivan

Who's Lying Now?

This week the New York Sun has a damaging story on Kerry's anti-war activities during the Vietnam War. Since the article is a little convoluted, here's my summation:

"How Kerry Quit Veterans Group Amid Dark Plot"

New York Sun, 12 March 2004. Thomas H. Lipscomb.
[See bottom of post for link to article]

John Kerry was the principal spokesman for an anti-war group that debated and voted on a plot to terrorize their political opponents, according to independent sources.

In November 1971, the radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War (V.V.A.W.) plotted to assassinate politicians who supported the Vietnam War. The group met in Kansas City to discuss the killings as an alternative to Kerry's idea of throwing medals at the Capitol. Kerry claims he resigned from the group prior to the meeting and did not attend. But several sources say he was in there, voted against the assassinations, and then verbally resigned.

Kerry's campaign says that he resigned from V.V.A.W. "sometime in the summer of 1971 ... Kerry was not at the Kansas City meeting [in November 1971]."

But two former V.V.A.W. members who attended the meeting remember that Kerry participated in Kansas City. One of these veterans is the current head of Missouri Veterans for Kerry. The man who proposed and prepared to undertake the 1971 assassinations, Camil, has recently been offered to become active in Kerry's Florida campaign. He confirmed the 1971 assassination plot.

There are questions about the timing of Kerry's resignation from V.V.A.W.; an eye witness claims that Kerry resigned verbally at the Kansas City meeting on November 12th; Kerry claims to have quit November 10th.

Also, in Kerry's recent biography (Tour of Duty), author Brinkley says that Kerry submitted a resignation letter dated November 10th; Brinkley quoted the letter but now claims he has never seen a copy.

Brinkley had cited the work of Hunt, a reputable historian and author of a book on the history of the V.V.A.W.; but Hunt says he couldn't find a resignation letter in the V.V.A.W.'s archived papers and doesn't know how Brinkley could have produced the quote. Brinkley says that Kerry doesn't have a personal copy of the supposed written resignation; but he says that Kerry claims to have quit the V.V.A.W. just two days prior to the meeting at which the assassination plan was discussed.

Two veterans and former members of V.V.A.W. say they attended the meeting and that Kerry was there. Barnes, now leading Missouri Veterans for Kerry, recalls that after the murder plot was voted down, Kerry resigned verbally.

Kerry has yet to produce evidence of his supposed written resignation. Kerry's presidential campaign now openly associates with men who have admitted to having debated the merits of assassinating conservative politicians and other political opponents in 1971.

When asked recently by the Sun why the assassinations still seemed necessary [in the autumn of 1971], Mr. Camil replied: “The war was still going on. We had to stop it.”

-

In 1971 Kerry was the leading spokesman for the V.V.A.W.; his testimony before Congress in April of that year has widely been criticized for its slander of American fighting men in Vietnam.

-

Link to Article:
How Kerry Quit Veterans Group Amid Dark Plot
http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2004/03/12&ID=Ar00100

Here's an article on Camil, from the Coshocton Tribune (Coshocton, Ohio) (Tuesday) August 3, 1971, Page 9, by Tom Tiede

Gainesville, Fla.--9NEA)--Twenty-five year-old Scott Camil is attending the University of Florida with hope of becoming an attorney. Thus, he is totally aware of all the implications of any confessions of manslaughter.

But he confesses anyway, here and now.

Sort of.

He says he has "stabbed and shot" or otherwise liquidated many people, perhaps 300 or more. He adds he has done away with them individually, acting only on impulse, and in large groups.

He has seen the victims burn up, blow apart, or fall from a hundred small wounds. He has heard them beg, scream, or just moan in bewilderment as they die.

Babies, old men, everyone.

"I stopped counting after I killed about 290, he observes, shrugging his shoulders. "At least that's what I think the count was. It was impossible to make an accurate count. Sometimes there were too many." He pauses to scratch his arm. "Like, I remember there was a farmer once. I had just gotten a new rifle and I wanted to see how well it worked. So I took off down a little road and the farmer was the first person I met. Well, anyway, the rifle worked fine."

It should be quickly pointed out here that Scott Camil's
extraordianary [sic] confession covers a period of time he spent fighting the war in the Republic of Vietnam. He was there for 20 months with the 1st Division Marines.

But the confessor is no longer a Marine. In fact he's the very antithesis of such. He won a half-dozen medals in Vietnam, he was a commendable soldier in every way -- but now he hates the memory of ever having worn the service uniform.

He's a veteran, but what a veteran. He's a full-bearded stringy-haired barefoot member of the very civilian civilian population . He wishes a pox on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He wishes the Marine Corps would have drowned on the shores of Tripoli. He wishes all the U. S. military rifles would jam forever.

To make his feelings known and to act on them to the maximum, Camil has joined 15-20,000 other ex-servicemen in a group known as Vietnam Veterans Against the War. (The same people who marched on Washington this spring to turn in their combat ribbons. ) Camil is Southeast regional coordinator for the organization. He operates his headquarters out of a sweaty, roach-infested apartment on the edge of the U. Of Florida's "student ghetto." He says his branch of the VVAW is small (30 members) but spunky. Its purpose
"To get everybody out of the war, goddam it, before we kill every human thing over there."

So it is that Camil wants his confession of manslaughter to be printed "without an excuse." He says the fact he killed while a soldier is no justification for it. He believes the nation must face up to the truth that Vietnam has given U.S. personnel license to kill at will. And his reason for confessing, he says, is to show how U.S. soldiers are "duped" to commit such crimes.

"Some of the people I killed were nothing but helpless civilians. They didn't have weapons or anything. They weren't any threat. They'd be living in , say, a village that happened to be in the way of the U. S. marines. And that was too bad for them. Unbelievable? Sure. But that's how it is in Vietnam. That's why I'll do anthing [sic], even confess myself, to end the slaughter over there."

There is little in Scott Camil's past to suggest the antiwar rebel he has become. For most of his life --until this year, in fact -- he was rather a straight arrow. Bred and educated in the conservative South (Miami), he was not so attracted to the pot-and-protest style of his generation in other parts of the nation Camil was reared by a cop and a teacher, her remembers the American flag waving over his home every Fourth of July. And so, "I didn't really think much about politics and that kind of thing. I played sports, I loved to bowl. And the only thing I knew about the war was the John Wayne movies."

When he was old enough, in 1965, he volunteered for military service. The Marine Corps, no less. Because "I'd been taught it was my patriotic duty." And because, "Frankly, at 19 years old, I was quite gun-ho. I was full of God and country. I had taken a required course in high school on communism, and it left me very suspicious of the little red bastards. So I wanted to get a crack at them. I wanted to be a real man, kill the commies, that kind of thing."

To be sure, Camil recalls, the Marine Corps was the right place for "that kind of thing." Leatherneck. Semper fidelis. The halls of Montezuma. Parris Island. Camil says the 10 weeks he spent in basic training were the worst days of his life--"much worse than combat" -- and taught him little but hate.

"We couldn't talk to each other in training. We had one hour each day to write letters, or go to the potty. We worked 16 hours a day. We were treated like dirt. The drill instructors called us maggots or lice. If you screwed up somebody would cuff you around. O.K., I know that people think the Marine Corps doesn't abuse the recruits any more. Bull! The drill instructors think SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) stands for Sockem or Punch-em. And pity the guy, who ever complained."

So, Camil says, he suffered in silence. And each night for 10 weeks he says he was ordered, with the others to lay at attention in bed for the "Marines Prayer":
"Another day in camp, Sir
Everyday is a holiday and
Every meal is a feast.
Pray for war, pray for war,
Pray for war.
God bless the Marine Corps,
God bless the drill instructor
Pray for war."

As it happened, such training was not lost on the young recruit. It was meant to turn him into a killer, and he says it did. "I didn't like the Corps. I hated the loss of my freedoms. But I learned to be hungry for war. And when I was sent to Vietnam (in 1966), I remember I was just itching to kill the enemy."

Kill he did, he asserts. Often illegally, usually in combat zones near Da Nang, and always with Bravo and Charley companies of the 1st Bn. 1st marines.

"We did everything, " he says now. "Like, once I saw some buddies take dead prisoners, cut their heads off and put them on stakes. Another time we chased the whole population out of a village and set fire to it; I counted 50 bodies of women and children we killed there. Another time, I saw a U.S. helicopter take two prisoners up in the air, and I saw the prisoners later drop out of the 'copter to their death. I remember we sued to bobby [sic] trap the dead bodies of people we shot. I remember we used white phosphorus grenades to burn people out of bunkers. I remember sometimes when we found enemy soldiers who wanted to surrender to us, we'd ignore their begging and just shoot them dead."

And more, much more:

"I saw women raped. I saw a man staked to the ground and his intestines cut out. I saw our medics inject some kind of killing fluid into the veins of POWs. It was terrible. But nobody cared. We thougyt [sic] of people there as less than animals. Well, if a little puppy was shot, we'd all feel very bad about it. But dead 'gooks' were another matter. That's the way the damn war there is."

The damn war that Scott Camil claims to have seen and fought in Vietnam did not sink into his conscience until well after he had seen it or fought it. During the activity, and for a long time after he had come home, he continued to be an anti-Communist hawk, and believed everything he had done was reasonable.

Then, he says, he read the Geneva Conventions. And for the first time he began to question, to wonder, to suspect.

"The change in me was gradual at first. I just grew a little mustache. The hardest part was admitting to myself that I was wrong. I had always believed in my nation, in my government. Now all of a sudden there was all this contrary evidence. I let the mustache go to a Fu Manchu. Pretty soon, I had a big beard. I was ashamed of what I had been. So I suppose, in a way, I decided to become somebody else."

The somebody he became is, as he sees it, a soldier for peace.

And so Camil is back in battle. As a VVAW officer he says he has spent some time skirmishing in Congress for anti-Vietnam legislation' "You might guess Forida [sic] lawmakers have been less than warm to the idea. Rep. Robert Sikes told a group of us once that we ought to have anchors tied on our feet and be thrown overboard as sea." He says his group shows antiwar movies, holds various pro-peace demonstrations, and tries to solicit new membership. "We had one guy in Brunswick, Ga., who was disowned by this father when he joined. He was a former Marine. His father is a Brunswick city councilman.

But the heaviest artillery in Scott Camil's new war is his confession of manslaughter. He claims it is documented with dates, unit nomenclatures, even map coordinates identification.

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