Free Republic

Sen. John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Friday that there is a "very active" effort under way to reach a negotiated political settlement with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Kerry (D-Mass.) acknowledged that "efforts" have begun after visiting Afghanistan and Pakistan this week, meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other officials. "I can report without being specific that there are efforts under way. They are serious and I completely agree with that fundamental premise — and so does General [David] Petraeus and so does President Obama — there is no military solution," he told NPR....

The shady Iranian fundraiser who for years donated lucrative sums to top Democrats—including the president, vice president and secretary of state—has pleaded guilty to a major bank-fraud scheme that could land him in jail for nearly two decades.Disgraced Democratic money man Hassan Nemazee admitted this week that he defrauded three financial institutions out of nearly $300 million in loan proceeds by falsifying documents and signatures to show he had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of collateral. The Ivy League-educated crook then used the proceeds to donate big bucks to the campaigns of federal, state and local candidates. Among them...

Sen. John Kerry has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him to grant asylum to a gay man who was married in Massachusetts and whose husband remains in the state. Genesio "Junior" Januario Oliveira was forced to return to Brazil in August 2007, when his application for asylum and an appeal were denied. Oliveira has been married since 2005 to Haverhill businessman Tim Coco.

US Senator John Kerry made a rare visit to the war-ravaged Gaza Strip on Thursday, but stressed this did not reflect a change of policy towards the territory's Islamist rulers listed by Washington as a terror group. The visit "does not indicate any shift whatsoever with respect to Hamas," said Kerry, who heads the Senate's powerful foreign relations committee. His first stop in the impoverished Palestinian enclave was the American school left in ruins by the deadly 22-day Israeli offensive that ended on January 18. Talking to a Palestinian lawyer amid the dust and rubble, Kerry defended Israel for responding...

Remember Wade Sanders? He was one of the "band of brothers"--Swift Boat veterans who supported John Kerry's presidential campaign and appeared onstage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Sanders was one of Kerry's nastiest surrogates. In August 2004, he likened the president to a "trapped animal." In September, he compared Karl Rove and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth chief John O'Neill to Josef Goebbels. He repeatedly referred to the president and his men as "chicken hawks," an especially nasty term because it is slang for a child molester as well as a derisive term for a nonveteran who favors a...

If you thought Scaramouche was a pretentious name for Sen. John Forbes Kerry to give his 42-foot Nantucket gigolo boat, he’s gone and topped himself. Liveshot has scuttled the name Scaramouche and rechristened it . . . Let It Be. That’s right, the Beatles song. From Freddie Mercury to John Lennon. I’m telling you, you cannot make this stuff up. Why “Let It Be?” My theory is the more appropriate Lennon-McCartney titles were taken: “Nowhere Man” and “I’m a Loser.” Not to mention “Fool on the Hill.”

Talk about déjà vu. Pressed by questions about a scandal-tarred fundraiser, a candidate named Clinton decides to return hundreds of thousands of dollars. The politician's operation promises to conduct criminal background checks on big fundraisers in the future. And it leaks its decisions at night after a busy day in hopes of burying the news and minimizing the damage. In 1997, the pol, of course, was Bill Clinton and the tainted money came from folks such as John Huang, Charlie Trie, Johnny Chung and Pauline Kanchanalak. A decade later, it's Hillary Rodham Clinton's turn to write refund checks to deflect...

In the spring of 2004, Sen. John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, made a presidential campaign stop in Pittsburgh. Soltz went, curious about one of the generation's most famous opponents of the Vietnam War. He introduced himself, and the two men spoke briefly. Afterward, Kerry called Soltz at home. "He said, 'I just want you to know that when I came home from Vietnam, I was angry like you, and that's OK,' " Soltz recalled. "Nobody in my life understood what was going on in my head at the time. Not my friends, not my family. But when someone like...

...[None] other than John Kerry himself who had counseled Soltz on his anti-victory activism. As reported by Fox News Channel and The Riehl World blog, "Soltz ... thanked Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, who opposed the Vietnam War after returning from combat, for helping him to focus his disillusionment after returning from Iraq." (They have the video to back it up too, which you can watch. .... Yet, left-wing activists have been engaged in a fierce campaign to undermine the war effort. No news there, but what is alarming is the degree to which they are organized, funded, and orchestrated. Jon...

Sen. John Kerry is in the Middle East trying to undermine U.S. foreign policy – a specialty since his youth. During a stop in Egypt last Friday, he told reporters he was willing to go to Tehran, presumably a la Neville Chamberlain in Munich, but, unfortunately, he was just too busy to establish peace in our time on his current trip. "I don't have time and we were not able to make arrangements in the short time span we had, but I would be willing to go," he explained. Asked if he planned to make the trip later, he said:...

Some people seem to have an unerring instinct for the wrong side of history. You can rely on them, at critical moments, to abandon friends and accommodate evil, in the name of good. Neville Chamberlain famously chose to talk with Adolph Hitler, and believed him when he agreed to peace in 1938. But Chamberlain was big enough a man to admit he was wrong in 1939, and to throw his support behind the winner when war broke out and he was politically beaten.     

Recently, I was re-reading one of P.J. O’Rourke’s books, and this happened to be while John Kerry was on Larry King Live. As Kerry was trying to dig his way out of a hole with such vigor that he was about to reach China, I ran across the chapter title, “Commies: Dead but too dumb to lie down.” I looked up at John Francois Kerry, and it was as if the gods of fortuitous timing were with me that evening. The chapter title, most of it anyway, was the perfect description of what has become of John Kerry’s presidential aspirations....

As national Democrats hang bunting and prepare for what they hope will be a joyous victory celebration in Washington tonight, John F. Kerry will be back in Massachusetts, quietly standing behind his state's gubernatorial nominee. Kerry's treks around the country were supposed to help erase bad memories of 2004 -- convincing Democrats that Kerry was a dogged worker and belonged among the party's top contenders for 2008. Instead, the campaign ended with the senator on the sidelines, grounded like a high-schooler caught misbehaving in class during the week before the prom. His "botched joke" ...gave the Republicans ammunition at a...

Swift Boater No. 1 November 5, 2006 12:50 am John Kerry's painful self-expiation SEN. JOHN KERRY'S little joke about smarts and soldiering in Iraq turned out to be, pardon the expression, not much of a swiftie. If the Kerry Correlation is true, the senator's performance at a California city college last week qualified him to be dropped off alone in middle of the Sunni Triangle with a rifle, pack, and desert uniform with a stitched-on name patch: Doofus. If that scenario sounds suicidal, Mr. Kerry's remark about the lazy and ill-educated "get[ting] stuck in Iraq"--he claimed later he was talking...

The Massachusetts congressional delegation would like to ask Sen. John Kerry a question: How can we miss you when you won’t go away? You see, there’s a whole other story involved in Gigolo John’s political suicide in Pasadena last week. For weeks, the persistent rumor had been that once the elections were over, Liveshot would announce that 1) he was officially running for president in 2008, and 2) he would not seek re-election to the Senate. Nobody cared about 1) because a 2008 run would have obviously been his next “botched joke,” but 2) would have set off a stampede...

This is it. The final days, the home stretch. We head into the weekend and then to the polls on Tuesday for what might just be one of the most important elections of our lifetime. I don’t ever remember feeling so tired. I’m tired of hearing people try to make excuses for people like John Kerry. I’m tired of hearing pollsters and pundits project a big victory for Democrats this Tuesday. I’m tired of hearing the vicious, bitter attacks on our President’s character by the likes of people like Keith Olbermann, a pseudo-intellectual Manhattan elitist who appears to be having...

John Kerry hasn't tucked tail and run this fast since his third Purple Heart in Vietnam. Then he wanted to get out of the free fire of the Viet Cong; now he wants out of the free fire of truth and analysis. Nonetheless, the world should take note of John Kerry, because this week he has given us all an indisputable truth. Liberals must lie, deceive, distort and – for lack of better terms – shuck and jive when it comes to their actual beliefs. They must do so constantly to attempt to trick mainstream Americans as to what they...

JIHAD IS FUN! VOTE DEMOCRAT! by Ann Coulter November 1, 2006 John Kerry is the "botched joke" of American politics. For those of you keeping score at home, John Kerry has now called members of the U.S. military (a) stupid, (b) crazy, (c) murderers, (d) rapists, (e) terrorizers of Iraqi women and children. I wonder what he'll call them tomorrow. Whatever Karl Rove is paying John Kerry to say stupid things, it's worth every penny. Now, back to the midterm elections ... Analysts place the average midterm loss for the party in the White House at around 15 to 44...

The Democrats' failed 2004 presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, may have just sabotaged his party's highest hopes for the 2006 midterm elections. Karl Rove himself couldn't have engineered a better campaign reminder of the Democrats' utter lack of credibility when it comes to supporting, respecting and leading America's military. Here is what Sen. Kerry told an audience of young people at a campaign event on the Pasadena City College campus on Monday held for losing California Democrat gubernatorial challenger Phil Angelides: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework,...

Thank you, John Kerry, for reminding me and the rest of America what an evil alternative you and your party represent for this country. I take a backseat to no one in my disgust for the failure of this president and the Republican Party in addressing some of the critical issues facing America – border security, controlled immigration, government spending, etc. So disenchanted was I – and I'm sure I speak for millions of other Americans – that I have been less than enthusiastic about next Tuesday's election. I asked myself: Does it really make a difference which party governs?...