Posted on 02/19/2004 2:18:26 PM PST by Maria S
John Kerry only a few weeks ago was presidentially dead, eclipsed by the media's selected Democratic presidential nominee, Dr. Howard Dean. Suddenly, Kerry is the darling again, due to Dean's self-destruction, General Wesley Clark's flakiness and dishonesty, and John Edwards' obvious inexperience and resulting unsuitability. Then there is Democrat desperation about who can beat President Bush. These realities have led to Kerry primary victories in overwhelming numbers. Yet his campaign may be turning again--based on newly exposed knowledge about his post-Vietnam behavior and a vaguely defined and questionable relationship with the gentler sex.
Forgetting the latter for now, how did ''Vietnam'' get into this campaign? An attack on alleged inadequacies in Mr. Bush's National Guard service 32 years ago, proudly contrasted by Kerry and his flacks with Kerry's reputed heroism in Vietnam, has led to a deep review of Kerry and his post-Vietnam behavior by his critics and the curious. Astounding revelations have emerged, depicting a Vietnam veteran who came back embittered and twisted, yet possessed of a deep political ambition and who then exploited his Vietnam experience as a basis for shaping his image and gaining notoriety.
John Kerry, the candidate for president that we see today, appears in his thinking to be very much like the John Kerry who first showed himself nationally as an angry Vietnam veteran of the 1970's. But he is smoother and slicker, much smarter, more sophisticated, and experienced in Congress where he fine-tuned his hypocritical tendencies and developed his political skills. We now see an ugly moth which morphed from the colorful caterpillar of leadership of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (V.V.A.W) of 1970. He is still a Massachusetts liberal, a political clone of Teddy Kennedy without the obesity and red-veined nose, a proven enemy of almost any national defense and intelligence expenditures, and a self-described ''internationalist.''
His vicious ad hominem attacks and calumny directed at President Bush in the last few weeks have also revealed a mean-spirited and fanatically ambitious man, seeking higher office at any cost and without concern for probity and integrity in his tactics or campaign language. He probably could have avoided the probing of his post-Vietnam behavior if he had last month called off his dogs on the false Bush National Guard allegations.
It was arrogant and obnoxious Michael Moore, flacking in mid-January for the doomed General Clark candidacy, who inadvertently introduced the Vietnam War issue into this year's presidential sweepstakes. This leftist huckster of propagandistic films and books called President Bush a ''deserter,'' referring to the President's youthful service in the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970's. Terry McAuliffe, DNC honcho who is always ready to slander a Republican, on a February 1 talk-show accused the President of being AWOL (Absent without leave) during his Guard service. McAuliffe promised to make the matter a 2004 campaign issue.
By the Moore and McAuliffe statements, the Vietnam War was now injected into the 2004 campaign. If the Republican nominee for president could be questioned on events 30+ years ago, the door was now open for John Kerry, putative Democrat nominee for the presidency, to be grilled on his strange behavior and attitudes towards his country since he returned from Navy service. He joined the angry and rebellious Vietnam Veterans Against the War during the same early 1970's when President Bush was a young lieutenant flying F-102's in the Air Guard.
So a rehash of the Bush guard service (surfacing in Bush political campaigns in 1995 and again in 2000) was grabbed by the reporters. They quickly dragged Kerry into the fray by asking him about his take on the allegations about Mr. Bush's service. Kerry, campaigning and already trashing Mr. Bush on many issues so as to look more formidable to Democrat primary voters, took the bait from the press on the Vietnam Era service by Mr. Bush and enthusiastically joined McAuliffe on the matter.
Outraged defenders of the President--many also in media--came back to Mr. Kerry's history and behavior since his return from Vietnam and the battle was joined. Thus the desire to damage the President by Moore and McAuliffe have led to rigorous research and the unplanned revelation of numerous disturbing stories about Kerry's pacifist behavior in the 1970's and the shaping of some radical philosophies arguably unacceptable in a would-be President of the United States.
Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam appears to have been honorable and, in an instance or two, noted by some as deserving of being called heroic. Yet there is evidence that two of his three Purple Hearts were for quite superficial small shrapnel wounds for which he bragged that he never ceased his normal full duty activity. And there is some dispute about the action in which he killed a Viet Cong, earning Kerry a Silver Star. His account of a mano-a-mano encounter varies from that of another vet who was there and relates that Kerry only administered a ''coup-de-grace'' to the man already gravely wounded by 50 Caliber bullets from a gun wielded by a Kerry comrade on Kerry's ''swift-boat.''
Nevertheless, this sort of experience and his overall Vietnam service--5 months on a small river patrol boat, and many more months earlier on a large support ship offshore from the Vietnam coast--seem to have had deep effects on Mr. Kerry's view of the world including serious embitterment about the nature and purpose of that war. Kerry's story is not unique for Vietnam veterans. Many veterans of Vietnam for a number of reasons, had their ideas, their personality and certainly their attitudes towards government modified by their experiences in that war and, perhaps more so, by lack of public support for their service at home.
But in the case of John Kerry, we are talking about a potential commander-in-chief who apparently was also changed drastically by his war experience. Yet he is not just another citizen ex-soldier who became a pacifist after his wartime service. The possible danger John Kerry presents to the nation as a presidential candidate can be surmised by looking, even superficially, at his public behavior and statements and his senatorial voting record since his discharge from service 30-plus years ago.
A president and commander-in-chief must look on protecting national security as paramount in the priorities of office. A natural partner to those concerns is the maintenance of national sovereignty as a foundation for setting foreign policy. John Kerry has over the years displayed questionable ideas about maintaining a strong national defense, adequately funding of the armed services and our intelligence complex, and having the will to use military force when it was necessary in the national interest. Beyond that, he has articulated from time to time a disturbing view that American interests can be and occasionally should be subordinated to a globalist interest!
From the time he became spokesperson for Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1970, one had to wonder where he was coming from. In February, 1970, he told the Harvard Crimson, ''I'm an internationalist; I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.'' More recently, as he whines about Mr. Bush's inadequacies, his only answer to the Iraq problem is to ''involve the U.N. and NATO (neither of which is willing!).
In that same ''Harvard Crimson'' interview, Kerry expressed the view that maybe the CIA should be abolished or greatly cut back. About 23 years later, in 1994, the year after the first Middle-Eastern terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, now Senator Kerry voted to cut $1 billion from counterterrorism activities. In 1995 alone he proposed a $1.5 billion cut in intelligence funding! Fortunately for the national security, both defense-nihilist Kerry proposals were defeated in the complete Senate. Altogether, Kerry would have cut $8 billion from intelligence funding in the 90's!
His time with the Vietnam Veterans Against War was also criticized because there were at least two major activities of that group funded by Jane Fonda, reviled heavily by Vietnam veterans as a notorious leftist and North Vietnam sympathizer. One, an alleged ''study'' of the evil nature of the war, found itself partially recounted in Kerry's testimony before Congress on April 23, 1971. Representing the V.V.A.W., he told the stunned Senate committee members that the war had a brutalizing effect on American servicemen, promoted by their leaders and commanders, stemming from a reprehensible national policy. In effect, he said that our armed forces were replete with war criminals and that such was an acceptable national policy!
He testified that the Vietnam troops (without giving specifics) were guilty of having ''personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.''
Kerry's possible motivation for such spectacular and nastily gruesome allegations against his ''band of brothers'' is still a mystery 30 years later. But hypocrisy rears its ugly head in view of this when contrasted with Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign where he has made so much of his fellow veterans supporting him and wrapping himself in his Vietnam service as testament to his ''experience'' in military matters, supposedly equipping him to be a commander-in-chief! One is expected to ignore the body of evidence that highlights his instinctive anti-military stance in his votes while in the United States Senate.
From the Boston Globe, 2003: ''In less than a week after his (Senate) appearance, Kerry was transformed from little-known former swift boat skipper to a national icon for a movement that advocated against U.S. involvement in Vietnam and (conversely) for the communist Vietnamese. Kerry was a supporter of the ''People's Peace Treaty,'' a supposed ''people's'' declaration to end the war, reportedly drawn up in communist East Germany. And so it went; rallies, conferences, demonstrations; John Kerry after his Senate testimony for V.V.A.W. was now a celebrity and, in Massachusetts in 1972, in George McGovern's time as presidential candidate, his pacifist positions were acceptable, at least in that state.
Much has been made of a possible connection between Kerry and Jane Fonda after recent widespread publication of a picture of him sitting behind Fonda at an anti-war rally on Labor Day, 1971, in Valley Forge Pennsylvania. Kerry, then a head of the radical anti-war group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, allegedly worked closely with Fonda on two war protests: the September 1970 rally in Valley Forge where Fonda and Kerry spoke from the back of the same pickup truck, and a January 1971 protest in Detroit which they called the ''Winter Soldier Investigation.'' Much of the data and stories and testimony of U.S. war atrocities presented there was later proven fabricated. Nevertheless, it became the core of Kerry's eventual Senate testimony in 1971. That year, however, even his ''connections'' with ''Hanoi Jane'' Fonda and other peaceniks like Tom Hayden and Ramsey Clark, was more or less OK.
Going deeper into the 2004 candidate's pacifist inclinations, one has but to look at other relevant Kerry votes as a senator. He led a failed ''nuclear freeze movement in the 1980's, trying to undercut or interfere with President Reagan's cold war efforts against the then Soviet Union.'' He voted against research on Reagan's ''Star Wars'' anti-missile system. He thus voted against the resulting technology which helped with development of the Patriot anti-missile system. He then voted later against that Patriot system which eventually saved perhaps thousands of American and Israeli lives in Gulf Wars I and II against the Iraqi SCUD missiles!
He voted against the core of our current weapons inventory and our Iraqi Freedom arsenal, namely the Abrams Fighting Tank and Bradley vehicle systems, the B-1 and B-2, the Apache Helicopter, the F-16, F-15, F-14-A, F-14D, the AV 88 Harrier, and the Tomahawk (Clinton's favorite cruise missile), the Patriot and the Trident (Basic U.S. submarine-based Ballistic Missile) weapon systems! Research has not revealed a possible initiative by Kerry to bring back the Bowie Knife!
The Boston Globe asserts that ''In the 1980's, the Associated Press reported that Kerry sat on the board of the radical liberal group'' Jobs with Peace Campaign, whose main objective was to ''develop public support for cutting the defense budget.'' They continue, ''Senator Kerry voted to reduce the defense spending levels for weapon projects by $8.8 billion in fiscal 1993. (Senate Congressional Resolution 106)''
In more recent times, no press member has asked Senator Kerry directly (surprise!) how he could vote against the first Gulf War (Bush 41), vote for the Second (Bush 43) in 2003 and then vote against the $87 billion needed to prosecute that second war against Saddam Hussein in 2003! All these votes show is an indecisive man conflicted by some substantial residue of his youthful but unchanged radical views of his country and how it deals with foreign interests inimical to the national interest.
There is literally a danger to the nation if John Kerry should ever occupy the oval office in these turbulent and hazardous times. He seems oblivious to our being at war. The 3000 dead Americans of 9/11 seem invisible and garbled in his mind with a hatred of President Bush. Kerry's muddled thinking about Mr. Bush's ''exaggeration and lies'' misled him into voting for the war in Iraq.
There is a real question about what he would do if he were President and, if we suffered another major terrorist attack here at home. Would he try to ''talk and negotiate'' with the terrorists or would he fire off a few ineffectual cruise missiles a la Clinton? Or would he be frozen into inactivity while he waited for whiz kids like Kofi Annan to respond to our call for help or to offer their ''international'' permission to retaliate?
Let's face it: all indicators--and there are thirty-plus years worth to look at--tell us in our hearts that John Kerry may not be a wuss but he is a confirmed peacenik in time of war, and we'll still be at war in November 2004. The last kind of commander-in-chief that we need is a peacenik! The unbreakable Republican majority in the House and Senate can hopefully protect the country from most Kerryesque stupidities in economic policy. But a Jane Fonda think-alike in the role of president scares me! It should terrify most thinking Americans.
8 TEXT FROM INTERCEPTED LETTER WRITTEN BY SUSPECTED TERRORIST LEADER ABU MUS’AB AL-ZARQAWI ~ CENTCOM | 2/19/04
Wow. Anyone else know anything about this?
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