THE POINT OF NO RETURN - WHO'S KERRY? (by retired Admiral and Senator Jeremiah Denton)

Knowing that I served in the U.S. Senate with John Kerry and that, like him, I am a veteran of the Vietnam War, many people have asked me what I think of him, particularly now that he's the apparent presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.

When Kerry joined me in the Senate, I already knew about his record of defamatory remarks and behavior criticizing U.S. policy in Vietnam and the conduct of our military personnel there. I had learned in North Vietnamese prisons how much harm such statements caused.

To me, his remarks and behavior amounted to giving aid and comfort to our Vietnamese and Soviet enemies. So I was not surprised when his subsequent overall voting pattern in the Senate was consistently detrimental to our national security.

Considering his demonstrated popularity during the Democratic primaries, I earnestly hope the American people will soberly consider Kerry's qualifications for the presidency in light of his position and record on both our cultural war at home and on national security issues.

To put it bluntly, John Kerry exemplifies the very reasons that I switched to the Republican Party. Like the majority in his political party, he has proven by his words and actions that his list of priorities -- his ideas on what most needs to be done to improve this country -- are almost opposite to my own.

Here are two issue areas that I consider top priorities: the war over the soul of America, and national security. Top priority should be placed on an effort to recover our most fundamental founding belief that our national objectives, policies and laws should reflect obedience to the will of Almighty God. Our Declaration of Independence, our national Constitution and each of the states' constitutions stress that basic American national principle.

For about 200 years, the entire country, both parties and all branches of government understood that principle and tried to follow it, if imperfectly. For some 50 years, our nation's opinion-makers, our courts and, gradually, our politicians have been abandoning our historical effort to be "one nation under God" in favor of becoming "one nation without God," with glaringly unfavorable results.

I believe our political leaders, educational system, parents and opinion-makers must all return to teaching the truth most emphasized by our Founding Fathers.

George Washington called religious belief indispensable to the prosperity of our democracy. William Penn said, "Men must choose to be governed by God or condemn themselves to be ruled by tyrants." And when asked what caused the Civil War, President Lincoln said, "We have forgotten God."

In these days we have not only forgotten God, we are by our new standards of government and culture rejecting him as the acknowledged creator and as the endower of our rights.

As a result, we are suffering cultural decay and human unhappiness. The decline of the institution of the family is the most obvious result. Perhaps the current movie, "The Passion of the Christ," will help many to come to realize the cost of the redemption of our sins, and the destructiveness of sin.

Let's remember that over 95 percent of Americans during our founding days were Christians, and though our Founding Fathers stipulated that no one was to be compelled to believe in any religion, and also stipulated that there would be no single Christian denomination installed as a national religion, there was no question that our laws were to be firmly based on the Judean Ten Commandments and on Christ's mandate to love your neighbor as you love yourself.

That setup brought us amazing success as a nation, lifting us from our humble beginnings, through crisis after crisis, to become the leading nation of the world.

Now, though, we are throwing away the very source of our strength and greatness. Yet I am not giving up on our country. I am encouraged at the stand and the attitude of our president, and inspired by his courage. There are many more of his stripe in Washington now.

Though Rome and other empires have decayed and fallen, the cultural war in the United States can and should be won by the majority of Americans -- a majority to whom Kerry and the Democrats disdainfully refer to as the "far right." They are people who believe in God and in the original concept of "one nation under God."

As a nation, we are now at the point of no return. The good guys are finally angry enough to join the fray, and I pray we are not too late. John Kerry is not among the good guys. The Democratic Party isn't, either.

Indeed, on the subject of national security, John Kerry epitomizes a fatal weakness in the Democratic Party. During the decisive days of the Cold War, after the Democratic Party changed during the mid-1960s, the party was on the wrong side of every strategic debate on policy regarding Vietnam and the USSR, and is now generally on the wrong side in the war on terrorism.

The truth is that the Cold War was barely won by a narrow margin -- a victory and a margin determined by the political choices made by our government regarding suitable steps to deter Soviet attack and finally win the Cold War.

If the U.S. had followed the Democratic Party line, the Cold War would have concluded with the U.S. having to surrender without a fight, or the U.S. would have been defeated in a nuclear war with acceptable losses to the USSR.

It was not Johnson and Carter and the Democrats; it was Nixon, Reagan, George Bush and the Republicans who led us to victory in the Cold War. And George W. Bush and the Republican majority -- not John Kerry and the Democrats -- can lead us to victory in the war on terrorism.

Jeremiah Denton is a retired Navy admiral who served in the U.S. Senate from 1981 to 1987. Readers can phone him at 473-1010, send e-mail to transff1@aol.com, or log on to his Web site at www.nff.org

Thanks for the great link.
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When John Kerry Slandered Me

Today, Senator John Kerry made a remarkable demand in this, an early political season for remarkable statements. Senator Kerry Challenges President Bush to Debate on Vietnam Service.

Flashback. Thirty-three years ago, in April, 1971, John Kerry and I had important months. In April, 1971, I was in the first month of my second deployment to Vietnam with the US Navy. That month my logbook shows 69.7 flight hours. That month my crew and I flew ten missions in support of Operation Market Time. On these flights we flew our unarmed P-3B airplane on “tracks” – flight paths during which we descended to within 200 feet of the water and, after fixing the contact’s position, speed, and course, took multiple photo runs to record a ship’s on-deck cargo, electronics, and weaponry. Sometimes the contacts turned out to be neutral freighters or US warships. Sometimes they turned out to be Soviet bloc ships or our primary targets, Chinese or North Vietnamese ships trying to sneak weapons into South Vietnam with which to arm the enemy. When we came across such a ship, sometimes they tried to shoot us down. We had nothing with which to shoot back since Secretary of Defense McNamara had prohibited us from carrying any weapons of self-defense (even pistols for our survival vests) in an attempt to appease the enemy and “facilitate the peace talks.” The weapons carried by the ships we aided in sinking never made it into enemy hands. In this way we saved the lives of our service comrades.

April, 1971, was also a big month for Former-Lieutenant John Kerry, who had recently resigned his commission so as to be able to brand my shipmates and me monsters. During the so-called “Winter Soldier Investigation” hearings before Congress, Kerry said,

“I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....

“They told the stories at times they had personally 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 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.

“We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

“We who have come here to Washington have come here because we f eel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out…”

Congress, to its everlasting shame, demanded no proof of these allegations but let them fester in the then-political atmosphere of running as fast as we could to abandon our allies in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. Subsequent writings by high-ranking communist officials and generals forthrightly thank Mr. Kerry for helping them achieve their subsequent military victory in Vietnam, and realizing the deaths of at least two-and-a-half million of their own people who were deemed "unnecessary" for the future.

Today, to add further insult to injury, Mr. Kerry harps upon his curiously brief service in Vietnam while assiduously censoring any mention of his activities afterwards in which he blood-libeled my shipmates. Daily, Michael Moore and his other surrogates screech that President Bush “dodged the draft” by joining the National Guard and that he “deserted” from the Guard because 30+-year-old Guard records are incomplete (thereby demonstrating his ongoing total ignorance of the military and the vicissitudes of military paperwork). Then, he demonstrates an utter lack of shame in today scolding George Bush, “America deserves a better debate. If you want to debate the Vietnam era, and the impact of our experiences on our approaches to presidential leadership, I am prepared to do so. ..” Mr. Kerry dragged Vietnam into this campaign and now whines that somehow George Bush is at fault for bringing it up.

My shipmates and I served honorably in Vietnam and returned home, almost to a man, to resume normal lives, start families and businesses, get civilian jobs, pursue further education … all the normal stuff that veterans have been doing since after the Revolutionary War. That Mr. Kerry, a former naval officer and fellow Vietnam veteran, would say such things about us remains an indelible stain upon his name and honor. Mr. Kerry has disgraced himself, by action and word, showing the whole world that he is foremost a career minded, self-centered opportunist, abetted by situational morality and driven by a lust for personal fortune at any cost. If he had any sense of honor, before he ran for the presidency, he would not attack Mr. Bush but would first apologize to my shipmates, the rest of the US armed forces, and then to the American public, for they deserve far better than anything this stained, pitiful man has to offer.

Ken Sherman

CDR, US Naval Reserve (Retired)

North Grafton, MA

Why do the TV and Cable Newsrooms
hide Hanoi Kerry's past?

"It is a fact that in the entire Vietnam War we did not lose one major battle.
We lost the war at home and at home John Kerry was the field general"

- Bob Elder, Swift Boat Veteran For Truth

DD 214 shows 17 Feb 72 terminal date of Reserve Obligation.

http://www.johnkerry.com/pdf/jkmilservice/DD214.pdf

Kerry's anti war activities were doing this period!

What is Senator John Kerry's relationship to VVAW?
http://www.vvaw.org/faq/#4

Since Vietnam Veterans Against the War's inception in 1967, tens of thousands of vets, GIs and supporters have participated in and supported the actions of VVAW. One of those members in the early 1970s was John Kerry. Kerry was appointed to the VVAW Executive Committee to assist in preparing Dewey Canyon III, VVAW's limited incursion into the land of Congress in 1971 (Nicosia, 98-99). Kerry made his greatest contribution to the anti-war movement and to VVAW in his speech to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 23, 1971 (Brinkley, 371-373: Hunt, 109-110; Nicosia, 136-138; Wells, 495).
Content of the speech is found at: http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/VVAW_Kerry_Senate.html.
By 1972, John Kerry had moved on from VVAW (Brinkley, 406: Hunt, 127-128; Nicosia, 211).
He was not one of the original founding members of VVAW in 1967.

Hanoi Kerry flew Viet Cong flag
while US troops died in Viet Nam

Kerry Fitness Reports in Vietnam
Show Him Unfit for Command
(Explodes Central Kerry Campaign Lie)

VVAW supported demonstration, Washington Spring Offensive, April - May 1971

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.

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew said that Kerry, "who drew rave notices in the media for his eloquent testimony before Congress," was using material ghosted for him by a former Kennedy speech writer (Adam Walinsky).

Picture #2, VVAW supported demonstration during the Washington Spring Offensive, April - May 1971.

Notice the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong flags.

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