Posted on 06/16/2003 5:28:05 PM PDT by AJ Insider
P.J. O'Rourke on John Kerry
The following selection written by P.J. O'Rourke revolves around the behavior of U.S. Congressional observers in the 1986 elections in the Philippines between Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino.
From Republican Party Reptile: Most of the Potomac Parakeets were a big disappointment. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry was a founding member of Vietnam Veterans against the War, but he was a bath toy in this fray.
On Sunday night, two days after the election, thirty of the computer operators from COMELEC walked off the job, protesting that vote figures were being juggled. Aquino supporters and NAMFREL volunteers took the operators, most of them young women, to a church, and hundreds of people formed a protective barrier around them.
Village Voice reporter Joe Conason and I had been tipped off about the walkout, and when we got to the church, we found Bea Zobel, one of Cory Aquino's top aides, in a tizzy. "The women are terrified," she said. "They're scared to go home. They don't know what to do. We don't know what to do." Joe and I suggested that Mrs. Zobel go to the Manila Hotel and bring back some members of the Congressional observer team. She came back with Kerry, who did nothing.
Kerry later said that he didn't talk to the COMELEC employees then because he wasn't allowed to. This is ridiculous. He was ushered into an area that had been cordoned off from the press and the crowd and where the computer operators were sitting. To talk to the women, all he would have had to do was raise his voice. Why he was reluctant, I can't tell you. I can tell you what any red-blooded representative of the U.S. government should have done. He should have shouted, "If you're frightened for your safety, I'll take you to the American embassy, and damn the man who tries to stop me." But all Kerry did was walk around like a male model in a concerned and thoughtful pose.
Probably wondering which way to the beach.
It must be mentioned that PJ, in "Hostage and Hijacker in Sunny Beirut" from the same book, refers to Robert Fisk as "my friend." I wonder if he thinks of Fisk that way now.
Many of PJ's articles - on the Nicaragua election, and his boat trip down the Volga, for example - should be required reading in high school.
John Kerry eats dove. Even better, he shoots them. From behind the stalks of a Southern cornfield, he'll watch them flutter and dart, and fire.
"You clean them. Let them hang. It takes three or four birds to have a meal," said the Massachusetts senator. "You might eat it at a picnic, cold roasted. I love dove." [With ketchup, we presume]
Dove, quail, duck, deer. Kerry described how to hunt and gut them, talking as he sliced through a steak at midnight after campaigning all day in Iowa for the Democratic presidential nomination. Carve out the heart, he said over dinner, pull out the entrails and cut up the meat. Bad table manners, perhaps, or good politics. After Sept. 11, 2001, some Democrats argue, they can't take the White House if they sound like doves. That is not a problem for the dove hunter. Kerry, 59, is the only combat veteran in the field. He stands 6-foot-4. He rides a Harley, plays ice hockey, snowboards, windsurfs, kitesurfs, and has such thick, aggressive hair he uses a brush with metal teeth.
"That's our slogan," quipped his ad man, Jim Margolis. "John Kerry: He's no weenie."
"He doesn't need a consultant to tell him how to dress like an alpha male," said his friend Ivan Schlager. "He is a damn alpha male." rest of bizarre article
Then check out the other PJ. He writes quite a bit including typing out the Al Gore At The Movies reviews.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.