Posted on 01/28/2004 2:21:16 AM PST by kattracks
PONTEFICATIONS
“AN AMERICA THAT BELONGS NOT TO THE PRIVILEGED, not to the few, but to all Americans.” That was what the winner of the New Hampshire Primary promised Tuesday night in his victory speech.
But, paradoxically, if Senator John Kerry becomes the Democratic nominee and is elected this November, the White House for the next four or eight years will belong to a man born to enormous wealth and privilege.
Kerry as a boy was raised and educated mostly in Europe. He fluently speaks, and thinks in, French. He preferred to marry wealthy women of foreign orientation. He believes that the United Nations and its permanent Security Council members such as France should have veto power over what actions the United States may take to defend its national security.
A Kerry presidency could therefore be tantamount to putting a quasi-European aristocrat in control of the United States and relinquishing to the United Nations a large measure of American sovereignty.
In Kerry-merica, patrician privilege would rule, and ordinary Americans and our Constitution would have less and less sovereign power.
Is he the “Real Deal,” as Kerry calls himself, or would a John Kerry presidency be a Dirty Deal, a Steal Deal for most Americans?
To glimpse this alternative future, we need to look deeper into John Kerry’s double-dealing past.
Both Bill Clinton and John Kerry modeled their personal ambitions on John F. Kennedy. Clinton imitated the womanizing, playboy JFK. Kerry imitated the young JFK, born to privilege, who volunteered to seek military glory in a PT boat.
Kerry grew up in a world of luxury boats and had gone yachting with John F. Kennedy. But his father had been a test pilot as well as a sailor. He cut his young son’s teeth on flying, and Kerry loved to pilot small airplanes. Despite this, when Vietnam beckoned Kerry signed up not for the Air Force but for the Navy to command small “swift boats” that resembled PT-109 in the Mekong Delta.
It was dangerous duty, bringing Kerry three wounds and three Purple Hearts. For risking his life to rescue a Green Beret who had been swept overboard amid enemy fire, Kerry was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor (“for personal bravery”). Days before the 2004 Iowa Caucuses, that now-Republican Special Forces soldier Jim Rassman traveled from Oregon to Iowa to thank Kerry for saving his life.
For single-handedly going ashore after and killing an enemy soldier who was armed with a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, Kerry was awarded the Silver Star (“for gallantry”). Boston Globe reporter David Warsh adduced evidence suggesting that this Viet Cong was alone, already wounded, and might have been shot in the back by Kerry. Soldiers serving under Lt. (Junior Grade) Kerry said Warsh was incorrect.
“I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others,” said Kerry as an anti-war activist guest on NBC’s Meet the Press (quoted in Brinkley’s book, page 362) after he returned stateside, “in that I shot in free fire zones, fired .50-caliber machine [gun] bullets, used harass-and-interdiction fire, joined in search-and-destroy missions, and burned villages. All of these acts are contrary to the laws of the Geneva Convention, and all were ordered as written, established policies from the top down, and the men who ordered this are war criminals.”
But Kerry was an officer in Vietnam who gave such orders to his men. Kerry has therefore confessed to being a war criminal himself. Was he saying that he was “merely following orders” from above, like a good German? Or does he accept his share of legal and moral responsibility for the illegal orders he said he gave? Either way, this is proof that John Kerry is, by his own yardstick, unfit ever to be President of the United States.
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971, Kerry claimed under oath that American soldiers had “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.”
He dramatically told reporters that such atrocities were the norm, not rare exceptions, for U.S. soldier behavior. This Kerry false blood libel against honorable soldiers gave protestors a kind of license to protestors to attack, belittle and ridicule soldiers returning to America.
But when Kerry became a Senator, using fame as his ladder to this political office, he would do something far worse to our soldiers, especially those held as prisoners of war.
For the record, some in the media recently echoed a website story claiming that Kerry had killed 21 unarmed Vietnamese civilians during the war. The author apparently confused Senator John Kerry with now-retired war hero and Senator Bob Kerrey (D-Nebraska).
Kerrey, to quote the liberal magazine The American Prospect (TAP), “had evidently ordered the wanton slaughter of 21 Vietnamese civilians, including babies, at point-blank range,” then filed a report claiming that all were Viet Cong. “That report,” wrote TAP reporter Robert Dreyfuss, “was enough to win Kerrey a Bronze Star, which he did not refuse.”
By contrast, John Kerry has told audiences that he “once refused a direct order from a far-away commander to open fire on a group of Vietnamese civilians standing alongside a riverbank in the Mekong,” wrote unabashed Kerry supporter Joe Shea in the January 21, 2004, issue of The American Reporter.
“When [Kerry] got back to base, facing the threat of a court martial,” writes Shea, “he defended himself with a tattered copy of the Rules of Engagement he kept handy in his hip pocket. He knew the rules, and he won the day."
Put aside the fact that these Rules of Engagement were always changing, and that many believe these often-bizarre and arbitrary bureaucratic restrictions on where, when and how our troops could fight were the reason America lost in Vietnam.
If we take Kerry’s story as true, we then face questions Shea neglected to raise. Did not these rules that Kerry knew by heart also require a soldier to report war crimes, or attempted war crimes, by others? Did Kerry report this officer’s illegal order to kill civilians to superiors? Or did Kerry remain silent, thereby becoming this officer’s ally and enabler, if not accomplice?
If this story is true, then I hereby ask Senator Kerry to name the officer who issued this illegal order and the officers before whom he defended with that tattered rule book his refusal to obey it. Surely a memory so indelible as to play a role in young Kerry’s anti-war speeches can also recall the name of this officer who ordered him to slaughter innocent civilians. (If 60-year-old Kerry’s memory is now failing, of course, this is evidence that he may have lost the mental acuity to be President.)
The same questions could be asked about all the other routine atrocities young Kerry alleged before a Senate committee. If he had firsthand knowledge from witnessing who did these illegal things, why did Kerry fail to turn in the criminals in accord with the Rules of Engagement? If he shielded those whose war crimes he witnessed, Kerry is an accomplice after the fact to these atrocities.
On the other hand, if his knowledge was only secondhand gossip, rumor or intoxicated tales told by bored soldiers around jungle campfires – what the law calls hearsay evidence – then Kerry was reckless, irresponsible and almost treasonous to make such outrageous claims under oath before the Senate, the press and the American people.
A paradox worth remembering is that Kerry modeled himself on President John F. Kennedy, the Commander-in-Chief who committed the first 17,000 armed troops into Vietnam. (Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sent only unarmed advisors.) So when Kerry criticizes what happened in Vietnam, and when on victory night in Iowa he embraced Ted Kennedy, Kerry has been wrapped up in the legacy of the very Democratic President who created the morass in Vietnam. Psychoanalysts have words for such mental aberrations.
Like most Leftist Democrats, Cleopatra Kerry has a Queen of Denial fixation with blaming Vietnam not on Democratic Presidents JFK or LBJ but on Republican Richard Nixon, who did not become President until 1969 when JFK’s war had been entrenched for seven years.
Coming home, decorated Vietnam veteran John Kerry quickly pushed himself into the spotlight of two anti-war activities funded by Jane Fonda – Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the so-called Winter Soldier Investigations.
If TV cameras were present, Kerry could be found staging events with other veterans – such as throwing medals away in protest on the steps of the Capitol. “This Administration forced us to return our medals,” Kerry told reporters at this event. (It later turned out that Kerry was throwing other peoples’ medals while keeping his own, an act of deceit and phoniness typical of Kerry.)
Cartoonist Gary Trudeau caught Kerry’s inner essence perfectly in two Doonesbury cartoons. “If you care about this country at all, you better go listen to that John Kerry fellow,” a stranger lectures Mike Doonesbury and B.D. in the October 21, 1971, strip. “He speaks with rare eloquence and astonishing conviction. If you see no one else this year, you must see John Kerry!”
The stranger departs, and B.D. asks “Who was that?” Mike responds: “John Kerry.”
In the next day’s Doonesbury, we see Kerry giving a crowd-rousing anti-war speech, at the end of which bubbles above his head reveal his inner thoughts: “You’re really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppie.”
Back then Kerry apparently believed that being anti-war was his ticket to fame, wealth and power. He expected to enter the holy city of Washington, D.C., riding a Democratic donkey while the adoring masses threw down palm branches before him.
(Kerry was dropped from Al Gore’s 2000 short list for Vice President mostly because Kerry had voted against the successful Gulf War in 1991, a war Gore cut a political deal to support. But in 2004 Kerry has been criticized by Democrats for voting, as Senators Hillary Clinton and John Edwards did, to give President George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq.)
In 2004, ironically, an older Kerry with a fake patina of maturity is trying to seize the White House by depicting himself as a war hero on horseback who says we need more troops for Iraq and comes wearing the Bronze and Silver Stars he once pretended to throw away.
This is worse than schizophrenia. The reality is that Kerry apparently did fight bravely in Vietnam, but he then betrayed his fellow soldiers in several ways. By supplying anti-war-propaganda ammunition to the enemy, Kerry encouraged the North Vietnamese to keep fighting and helped prolong the war.
Only God knows how many more Americans and Vietnamese died because of Kerry’s ego-trip activism. Every time you visit that black memorial with nearly 70,000 names in Washington, D.C., remember that some of them died because John Kerry gave aid and comfort to the enemy in order to advance his own celebrity, wealth and power.
Whenever Kerry now prates that the first duty of a Commander-in-Chief is to protect the lives of our soldiers, this hypocrite should be spit on by everyone present in remembrance of all the American soldiers Kerry helped our enemies to kill.
Kerry apparently fancies himself a bridge between America and Vietnam, between those who fought the war and those who fought against it, and between the opposed worlds of Communism and Capitalism.
During the Clinton era, Kerry received an $8,000 campaign contribution from notorious Democratic brown bag man Johnny Chung at a 1996 fundraiser. That same year the Senator took $10,000, in exchange for which Kerry arranged a high level meeting between Communist Chinese intelligence operative Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chaoying, Johnny Chung and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
From Red China’s point of view, this SEC meeting apparently had multiple purposes – including money to be made from creating Chinese “front” companies on American stock exchanges, and the potential use of such companies to transfer militarily-useful technologies and hardware to Beijing.
Seen as a friend and ally by the Communist regime in Vietnam, Senator Kerry knew that a huge lucrative prize might be within his grasp. As they are today over Iran, giant multinational corporations have been eager to sell goods and purchase resources in Vietnam. The Marxist Vietnamese dictatorship has been eager to re-enter the world marketplace, especially with its chief ally the Soviet Union gone. A politician who restored links between Vietnam and America could gain huge amounts of money in campaign contributions and other benefits.
What stood in the way of such a profitable thaw in U.S.-Vietnam relations, Kerry knew, were the lack of human rights in Vietnam and its apparent continued holding of many American prisoners of war (POWs) and soldiers missing in action (MIAs) from the war.
To make these stumbling blocks disappear, Kerry in 1991 conjured a new Senate Select Committee for POW/MIA Affairs with himself as chairman and his legislative assistant Ms. Francis Zwenig as the committee’s Chief of Staff. She would act as liaison to interested corporations through their umbrella organization, the U.S./Vietnam Trade Council (that she would later leave the committee to run).
“Zwenig, according to documents, coached the North Vietnamese to concoct plausible stories on the fate of POW/MIAs in order to show that Hanoi was cooperating to resolve the POW/MIA issue, a hurdle in the diplomatic dance to lift the trade embargo and renew relations with Vietnam,” writes Anthony Nguyen at the anti-communist website VietPage.com.
“Senator Kerry,” Nguyen continues, “was caught on camera making a promise to the North Vietnamese communists that he would ensure that they weren’t embarrassed by their concocted stories.”
Senator Kerry also prevented a vote on the Vietnam Human Rights Act (HR2833), which would have made lifting trade restrictions contingent on Communist Vietnam restoring basic human rights. By stopping this measure from becoming law, Kerry protected Marxist Vietnam from pressure to free its slave society.
Through much manipulation and arm-twisting, Kerry persuaded his now-defunct committee to vote unanimously that no POWs existed in Vietnam. And with the disappearance of this and the proposed human rights legislation, Kerry gave Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party the pretext they needed to begin re-opening trade that could help keep the Marxist Vietnamese dictatorship afloat. Those given first place in line for such trade opportunities, of course, were the biggest contributors to Democrats such as Senator Kerry and Bill Clinton.
The year after his committee’s vote to give Communist Vietnam a clean bill of health, the strangest thing happened. In December 1992 Vietnam signed its first huge commercial deal worth at least $905 million to develop a deep-sea commercial port at Vung Tau to accommodate all the trade that was to come. It signed the deal with a company called Colliers International. At the time, the Chief Executive Officer of this company was C. Stewart Forbes. Name sound familiar? It should. He is Senator John F. Kerry’s cousin. What a coincidence!
Less widely noticed, when the Democratic Party decided to give Kerry a leg up towards its presidential nomination by holding its 2004 National Convention in Boston, certain big corporations rushed to pony up money for the Democratic event. One of the first of these rushing to fill Democratic coffers was Spaulding & Slye Colliers, the current corporate partnership involving Colliers International, which anted up $100,000.
The Boston press sniffed at how this and other companies with business pending before the Democrat-dominated city might be trying to curry favor or satisfy politician demands for money.
But perhaps a more global agenda is at work behind the scenes. Money is fungible, and part of the Vietnam millions channeled to Colliers International can easily be inferred to be co-mingled in this $100,000 donation to the Democratic National Convention.
This July as you watch the red, white and blue balloons fall from that Boston convention ceiling to celebrate the newly-selected Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, think of the red ones as being purchased and used to seduce you by Communist Vietnam.
And if Kerry surprises the world by naming as his running mate Arizona Republican John McCain, former POW and Kerry’s close friend and ally in re-opening trade with Vietnam, remember on election day the prisoners of war still in Vietnam who will never come home to their families because they were betrayed by the politics of cash and Kerry.
To read Part One of this article on Kerry, Click Here.
Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and Sundays 9 PM-Midnight Eastern Time (6-9 PM Pacific Time) on the Liberty Broadcasting network (formerly TalkAmerica). Internet Audio worldwide is at LibertyBroadcasting .com. The show’s live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader’s Digest.
-John Kerry- some selected, informative links...--
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All anybody really needs to know.
John Kerry would make a lousy POTUS.
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