GIMMEE AN "F"
Country Joe and the Fish
John Effing Kerry
Posted on 02/23/2004 5:46:02 AM PST by SJackson
Kerry arrives in New York today. Our city is an old stomping ground of his, of course. He used to hang out at 156 Fifth Avenue - the headquarters of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Kerry was present at those offices in September 1970, when the group decided to write then-Mayor John V. Lindsay and demand that the city refuse to welcome another organization, one dedicated to representing other American servicemen.
The group John Kerry and his associates were protesting was The National Guard Association, which had its 1970 convention in New York at the Americana Hotel (now the New York Sheraton) from Sept. 13 to Sept. 17. Kerry's group set up a picket line in front of the Americana, and staged a protest rally against the Guard on Sept. 17, 1970 at 5:30 pm.
Why would they do such a thing? Here's the sort of rhetoric Kerry and Co. used to gather anti-war forces in a mimeographed flyer:
"The National Guard Uses Your Tax Dollar:
"To support the military-industrial complex
"To honor war criminals - Westmoreland, Laird, Nixon, etc.
"To applaud campus murders by National Guard units
"To encourage armed attacks on minority communities"
The decision to stage this defamatory protest against the National Guard - which then comprised 409,412 Army Guard and 89,847 Air Guard personnel - was made in John Kerry's presence and with his full knowledge. Executive-committee minutes for Vietnam Veterans Against the War note that among the six "members attending" a meeting to plan the protest was "John Kerry-NE Rep."
Now, Kerry and others will tell you that Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a group dedicated to advancing the interests of American servicemen - protecting them, bringing them home, helping them. The group's protest against the National Guard Association demonstrates that this claim is revisionist history with a vengeance.
Four months before the National Guard protest in New York, 100 Ohio Guardsmen confronted 1,500 rioting students at Kent State University who pelted them with rocks and bottles. Mistakenly believing that they were coming under gunfire, 30 Guardsmen fired into the crowd, killing 4 and wounding 9.
The Kent State killings were horrifying tragedies, and the anti-war movement portrayed them as deliberate acts of murder. They weren't. But even if you think that those 30 Guardsmen in Ohio had been guilty of a terrible crime, the fact remains that they were only 30 Guardsmen out of 500,000 nationwide.
Despite that fact, John Kerry and his organization thought that it was acceptable and desirable to tar the reputations of 500,000 American servicemen by assigning collective guilt to the "campus murders" the flyer decries.
And what about the flyer's accusation that the National Guard staged "armed attacks on minority communities"? Across the country in 1968, the Guard were called up to protect businesses and individuals from rampaging rioters. The rioters who burned down whole neighborhoods and laid minority communities to waste in Washington, Detroit, Newark and other cities.
The only thing that saved those cities from mass anarchy were young National Guardsmen, called up to protect innocent citizens from violent criminals. And yet John Kerry's group thought it was OK to say the entire National Guard perpetrated "armed attacks in minority communities."
But then Kerry was throwing around a lot of collective-guilt accusations in those days. He went before the Senate and accused his fellow American soldiers in Vietnam of "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." He compared American conduct in Vietnam to the behavior of Genghis Khan, and said American forces "generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war."
But according to Kerry, these American war criminals weren't the truly responsible parties. Kerry made a speech in April 1971 in front of the New York Stock Exchange in which he referred to William Calley, who was responsible for one of the few documented American atrocities committed during the Vietnam war.
"Guilty as Lt. Calley might have been of the actual act of murder," Kerry said, "the verdict does not single out the real criminal. Those of us who have served in Vietnam know that the real guilty party is the United States of America."
You see, America had become so evil, in Kerry's eyes, that when it constituted a military force to fight the Vietnam war it "created a monster." This "monster" came "in the forms of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who have returned with a sense of danger."
Thus was John Kerry a key midwife in the birthing of one of of the worst myths ever fostered in this country: The myth of the crazed, violent, dangerous Vietnam vet who had come back to America to wreak the same kind of devastation here he had wreaked in Southeast Asia.
At the same time John Kerry was trashing 3 million Americans who served in Vietnam and the National Guard, a young man named George W. Bush was piloting F-102 aircraft in the Texas National Guard. By this point in his six-year service, the future president had already spent nearly two years on active duty - not weekend-warrior stuff, but full-time service to his state and his country.
True, Bush's service can't compare to John Kerry's. Kerry saved lives, suffered injuries and won medals for his valor in Vietnam. But Kerry's heroics aboard a Mekong Delta patrol boat does not excuse his conduct afterward, when the future senator felt free to engage in shocking acts of libel against his country and against an entire generation of Americans who served their country just as he did.
Among those he libeled was Texas Air National Guardsman George W. Bush, against whom John Kerry and his organization protested on that dark day back in September 1970 on Seventh Avenue and 52nd Street.
Enjoy your stay in New York, John Kerry. This city is the worse for having hosted you and your smelly little protest 34 years ago.
And since Vietnam, Bush has saved countless lives and even whole countries by confronting and defeating evil, while Kerry has voted to appease, coddle, and grovel before those who would destroy us. Pretty clear choice to me.
Kerry is scum.
Also, questions answered with "Were YOU in Vietnam?" should at minimum be somehow about Vietnam.
Here's what I've been able to pull up with FR and Google
Well I guess you could say shooting someone in the back and blowing away a mother and child was "saving lives", but I remain skeptical. Something about Kerry's wartime service smells to high heaven.
Oh yes, I remember when President Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas National Guard to keep blacks out of Little Rock High School.
Oh sure, and the times President Kennedy sent the Alabama National Guard to help George Wallace keep out the black students from the U of Alabama.
Some people never learn.
Now Kerry is running against a black man, Al Sharpton.
Kerry is trying to deny Sharpton the right to be president.
Kerry is just as bad as his despised national guard.
Is it any wonder why he hates Bush's national guard service also?
(I employ the logic of Democrats....pardon me)
We should wait until he has the Nomination all sewn up. But then, the Democrats will pull a "Lautenberg", so I suppose we may as well get on with exposing this fraud and let the chips fall where they may.
Country Joe and the Fish
John Effing Kerry
But we really only have Kerry's continuous word for his heroism. Why not just do a record dump of his Vietnam service and be done with it? Surely, with a "chestfull of medals," he would have nothing to hide, and he could score a PR coup by once again reminding us that he was in Vietnam (did you know that he was there?).
Of course, if there was something a little dicey in that record, which his reticence about releasing is seemingly saying, then he will have a bit of a problem.
Why isn't Russert demanding that record dump as he did of the President?
John Kerry wanted to treat the act of a few Guardsmen as a class action by the whole guard, yet wants to treat international terrorist as individual criminals.
Demand? Of Kerry? That might be questioning his patriotism. Russert is a Dem lackey who revels in the "gotcha" soundbite when it comes to conservatives. Don't ever expect anything even-handed from Russert or his ilk.
Nay, the Democratic Party exalts such filth to its highest ranks, giving him (at least for the moment) their pedestal from which to attack the President and National Guard troops!
There is no doubt that Democrats have recently again made clear, not to mention the additional antics of the San Francisco mayor, that they absolutely have earned our duty to see them driven from power via the ballot box!
There should be a sweet smell in the air, come November 3rd!
HF
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