The Character Issue Will Hurt Kerry - BADLY

Self | 1-30-04 | Jonathan M. Stein

[Salvation]

As to his Catholicity -- here are some threads that bring it into question. Also character non-building??

The Deadly Dozen

Blood On Their Hands: Exposing Pro-abortion Catholic Politicians

Kerry [Catholic} says he'll filibuster Supreme Court nominees who do not support abortion rights

PETITION TO EX-COMMUNICATE PRO-ABORTION CATHOLIC ELECTED OFFICIALS

Catholics Kerry and Kennedy have a 100% Pro-homosexual Record with the Human Rights Campaign! Page 10,11

Kerry says he alone hasn't 'played games' on abortion

AS KERRY EMERGES, SO DOES CONCERN THAT AS PRESIDENT HE MAY BE DENIED COMMUNION

[Mo1]

Kerry dumped the first wife and family for a presumably better, richer wife. IMO, he's a creep.

I may be wrong .. but I did read that she had a nervous breakdown from being ignored by John. They eventually divorced and she has since remarried.

[Salvation]

This picture doesn't say much about his character either:

From Vietnam Veterans against John Kerry

[jmstein7]

BUMP!

[Hon]

"The Vets Against Kerry site has great summary quotes from the Congressional Record, et al."

It's a good site, but there are some mistakes.

For instance, the quote you are using from there about the shooting of the "baby" seems to be wrong--unless they have another source.

The only thing I can find near to it is this, from a Boston Globe article:

"But Kerry does recall a harrowing incident, which he has never previously publicly discussed, in which he said a crew member shot and killed a Vietnamese boy of perhaps 12 years of age.

A member of Kerry's crew announced he was shooting, and the air filled with the ack-ack-ack of gunfire. The rounds blasted into a sampan, hurling the child into the rice paddy. The mother screamed as the flimsy craft began to sink, and Kerry, shining a searchlight, yelled, "Cease fire! Cease fire!"

Kerry said his crew rescued the mother, took her aboard the Navy vessel for questioning, and left the child behind. Due to the dangerous location, and the possibility that the gunfire had drawn the notice of Viet Cong, Kerry never had a chance to see whether the woman was hiding weaponry in the sunken boat, and does not know to this day whether his crew faced a real threat.

"It is one of those terrible things, and I'll never forget, ever, the sight of that child," Kerry said. "But there was nothing that anybody could have done about it. It was the only instance of that happening."

http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061603.shtml

It looks to me like they are mixing up the KerrEy story with the Kerry one.

You and they need to be more careful with their quotes and citations. These are serious charges and it is a very easy way to discredit yourself for a long time if you get it wrong.

[Hon]

That is another example of what I just said in my previous post. I believe that is a doctored photo. It is Kerry's picture from when he testified before the Fulbright committee in the Senate with a VietCong flag photoshopped in.

This site might be doing as much harm as good if they don't make that clear and people think it is an actual photo. (Not that Kerry wasn't in close proximity to VietCong flags in his anti-war demonstrations.)

[jmstein7]

Nobody really thinks that is a real photo; it's pretty clear that it's a parody.

[SkyPilot]

Amen--we don't need inaccurate vanities on FR.

[Hon]

"Nobody really thinks that is a real photo; it's pretty clear that it's a parody."

The person I posted my comment about it seems to have taken it to be real:

"This picture doesn't say much about his character either"

[Mo1]

I found this in my travels .. she seems to have done some rearch on Kerry

Is John Kerry the new Democrat Golden Boy?

[mwl1]

Read Ann Coulter's column from yesterday at townhall.com - it disects the lack of character in John Kerry

[Grampa Dave]

Before Botox and the injection of his butt fat into his cheeks:

After the 666 tatoo removal, Botox injections in the forehead, injections of his butt fat into his jowls, some of the Clintoon Hair dye, and a gallon of Get the Red Out of Yo Eyes, we have the new Lurch:

[diotima]

Thanks for ping!

[backhoe]

Mo1, thanks for providing that link- I hadn't gotten around to it.

[jmstein7]

One source nailed:

The Bulletin's Frontrunner June 16, 2003 Monday

SECTION: Presidential Campaign

HEADLINE: Kerry's Combat Experience Explored.

The AP (6/16) reports, "John Kerry, who was wounded three times during his time in Vietnam, asked for and received a reassignment that allowed him to leave the combat zone in April 1969, six months before his second tour of duty was scheduled to end, according to a published report. Commodore Charles F. Horne, commander of the coastal squadron in which Kerry served, said recipients of three Purple Hearts could make such a request under then-existing naval rules and it was 'above board and proper.'" The AP adds, "Kerry requested the transfer just days after a March 13, 1969 incident for which he was awarded a Bronze Star. Kerry, while under fire, rescued a Green Beret who had fallen overboard. Kerry had been wounded just moments earlier when a mine detonated near his 'swift boat,' the small vessels that made forays into the Mekong River delta."

[arasina]

From a June 17, 2003 Boston Globe article entitled John F. Kerry, Candidate in The Making:

Again and again, the question was asked: Did Kerry commit atrocities or see them committed by others? Kerry stuck to his script.

"I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that," Kerry said. "However, I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these acts, I find out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty. But we are not trying to find war criminals. That is not our purpose. It never has been."

O'Neill for years has declined to talk about the experience, partly because he says he became disillusioned with politics and government after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

But in a telephone interview from Texas, where he is a trial attorney, O'Neill made it clear he still harbors resentment at the way Kerry accused veterans of atrocities.

"The primary reason I got involved was I thought the charges of war crimes were irresponsible and wrong," O'Neill said. "I thought they did a real disservice to all the people that were there. I thought they were immoral."

The bitterness remains. Asked whether he agrees with the view of some observers that Kerry was forever altered by the war, O'Neill responded: "The war didn't change [Kerry]. I think he was a guy driven tremendously by ambition. I think he was that way before he went and is that way today."

[xp38]

I think the DNC counter talking point will be...Everyone lies about Botox.

[Eva]

I have read the same stories about Kerry's record, they were on a VVA site that someone linked to. I have read elsewhere about the fact that Kerry admitted to having recieved his medal for bravery for shooting a wounded man who was trying to escape, after someone in Kerry's unit had hit him and the hootch he was hiding in with multiple rounds of machine gun fire.

Kerry has also admitted that his first two wonds were only band-aid type injuries in which he lost no duty time and the third injury was a slight injury to his leg which necessitated two days in the hosp. Ordinarily it would have been back to duty after such a quick recovery, but not for Kerry. How did he do that? I've been wondering that myself.

[arasina]

Along the same lines as my previous post, from a Oct-Dec 1996 issue of U.S. Veteran Dispatch:

Almost forgotten in that famous speech were Kerry's controversial assertions that Vietnam veterans had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephone to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

To some veterans, including some of those who served alongside Kerry, this was too much. They thought they had served honorably, and they had seen Kerry as a gung-ho skipper who led the charge and didn't voice such opposition on the battlefield.

"I would go up a river with that man anytime. He was a great American fighting man," said Michael Bernique, a highly decorated veteran who served as a swift boat skipper alongside Kerry. But Bernique remains upset with Kerry's assertion that atrocities were committed, an assertion that Kerry has not backed away from. "I think there was a point in time when John was making it up fast and quick. I think he was saying whatever he needed to say."

BUT EVEN MORE INTERESTING TO ME, is this from the same article:

Kerry gained national attention in April 1971, when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then chaired by Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-AR), who led opposition in the Congress against U.S. participation in the war. During the course of his testimony, Kerry stated that the United States had a definite obligation to make extensive economic reparations to the people of Vietnam.

Kerry's testimony, it should be noted, occurred while some of his fellow Vietnam veterans were known by the world to be enduring terrible suffering as prisoners of war in North Vietnamese prisons. 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. It included nine points, all of which were taken from Viet Cong peace proposals at the Paris peace talks as conditions for ending the war.

One of the provisions stated: "The Vietnamese pledge that as soon as the U.S. government publicly sets a date for total withdrawal [from Vietnam], they will enter discussion to secure the release of all American prisoners, including pilots captured while bombing North Vietnam." In other words, Kerry and his VVAW advocated the communist line to withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam first and then negotiate with Hanoi over the release of prisoners. Had the nine points of the "People's Peace Treaty" favored by Kerry been accepted by American negotiators, the United States would have totally lost all leverage to get the communists to release any POWs captured during the war years.

I just had to include a photo.

In Lowell, Mass., the veteran and onetime antiwar activist, watches as President Nixon announces a Vietnam cease-fire in January 1973.

[Hon]

"Kerry has also admitted that his first two wonds were only band-aid type injuries in which he lost no duty time and the third injury was a slight injury to his leg which necessitated two days in the hosp."

Yes. And note what his commanding officer said about that.

(This is from the Boston Globe series I linked above and which seems to be the source of just about all of these stories):

"Kerry had been wounded three times and received three Purple Hearts. Asked about the severity of the wounds, Kerry said that one of them cost him about two days of service, and that the other two did not interrupt his duty. "Walking wounded," as Kerry put it. A shrapnel wound in his left arm gave Kerry pain for years. Kerry declined a request from the Globe to sign a waiver authorizing the release of military documents that are covered under the Privacy Act and that might shed more light on the extent of the treatment Kerry needed as a result of the wounds.

"There were an awful lot of Purple Hearts -- from shrapnel, some of those might have been M-40 grenades," said Elliott, Kerry's commanding officer. "The Purple Hearts were coming down in boxes. Kerry, he had three Purple Hearts. None of them took him off duty. Not to belittle it, that was more the rule than the exception."

http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061603.shtml