Posted on 08/09/2004 4:07:19 PM PDT by MadIvan
John Kerry is too strange to be president. I don't mean "strange" in the way of his predecessor. Al Gore, the first Android-American to run for president, was weird. But Kerry's strangeness is of an entirely different order.
For purposes of comparison, go back a couple of months to that fevered few weeks when Michael Moore, bigshot Democrats and the media were hounding Bush over his allegedly spotty attendance in the Texas Air National Guard during the early Seventies.
The point is, even if it were true, it fits the Bush narrative: he was a lackadaisical son of privilege who goofed around, drank too much, found Jesus, sobered up and got his life together. If you've got 30-year-old pictures of him dancing naked on a bar in Mexico when he was supposed to be back at the air base, so what? It's compatible with the official version. That's Bush: the bad stuff still fits the picture.
But with Kerry, even before any gaffes or scandals, the official narrative makes no sense. He's publicly opposed to the Vietnam War. But he volunteers for it. Then he comes back disgusted with his experience in war, publicly hurls his medals away (or someone else's: that story keeps changing), denounces his fellow veterans as war criminals, torturers and rapists, and claims that he personally committed atrocities.
But then he decides to run for president and suddenly Jane Fonda morphs into John Wayne and all those war criminals are war heroes he wants at every rally and he's got his medals back and his disgust at his wartime experience has mysteriously turned into pride in his wartime experience to the exclusion of all else.
If Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand or any of his other Hollywood supporters got a script like that, they'd send it to rewrite. Either that or they'd figure they'd got an early, rejected draft of the new Manchurian Candidate.
That's what people mean when they talk about how "complex" and "nuanced" Kerry is. They don't mean his positions on the great questions of the day are complex and nuanced.
Quite the contrary: for the purposes of this campaign, his entire political career – 20 years as Senator, Lieutenant-Governor to Michael Dukakis – has been dropped from his CV. If Kerry had exhibited the slightest trace of any interestingly complex view of any policy matter, you can be sure we'd have heard about it. But he hasn't.
So the only "complex" aspect of the Kerry campaign is the man himself, who's complex in ways that don't seem entirely healthy. My chums across the page were rather dismissive yesterday about "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth", a group of fellow officers who think he's unfit to be president.
Let's take it as read that Swiftees who support or oppose Kerry are "politically motivated": the fact is, the Swiftees opposed to him significantly outnumber the four who support him, which is interesting in itself. But consider just one of the items from their new book about him.
For decades, John Kerry has told anyone who'd listen that at Christmas 1968 he was on an illegal mission inside Cambodia. On the floor of the Senate in 1986, while attacking President Reagan for turning Central America into another Vietnam quagmire (wrong as usual), Kerry said: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared – seared – in me."
The illegal Yuletide foray was so seared into him that he brought it up at every opportunity.
As he told the Boston Herald in 1979, "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."
LBJ was President on Christmas Eve 1968, but let that pass. Here's an Associated Press story from 1992: "Navy Lt John Kerry knew he had no business steering his Mekong River patrol boat across the border into Cambodia, but orders were orders… By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia."
Just one problem. It never happened. Every living officer up his chain of command says Kerry was never ordered to Cambodia. At least three of his five crewmen say their boat was never in Cambodia. And if you don't believe any of his fellow veterans, read the excerpt from Kerry's own journal published in Tour Of Duty, the recent hagiography by Douglas Brinkley.
On December 24 1968, Kerry was at Sa Dec – that's well inside Vietnam, 55 miles from the Cambodian border – and waxing wistful to his diary about a quiet Christmas far from home: "Visions of sugarplums really do dance through your head and you think of stockings and snow and roast chestnuts and fires with birch logs and all that is good and warm and real. It's Christmas Eve."
I'm Vietnammed out. But it's the centrepiece of Kerry's campaign: the other day, asked a straightforward question about 9/11, he stuck to the current millennium for a good 20 seconds and then veered off into "the war that I fought in was a war where we saw America lose its support for the war, where the soldiers came back having had to do what our soldiers are doing today, carry an M-16 in another country, try to tell the difference between friend and foe. I know what it's like to go out at night on patrol", etc, etc. So, since Vietnam seems to be the only subject on which he has anything to say, it would be reassuring to know that at least he's got that right.
For most of his adult life John Kerry has peddled as his central Vietnam anecdote – the one that drove him to turn on his nation's leaders – what appears to be a complete fantasy. Why would he do such a thing? If there's a good answer to that question, maybe someone in his doting press pack would like to ask it.
---I noticed that kerry's spokesRATs (juan williams in this case) are now claiming that maybe kerry just thought he was in Cambodia when he really wasn't. ---
That's not going to work. He used Cambodia as a political prop too extensively. Are we supposed to feel better that the Democratic candidate for President is a buffoon instead of or maybe in addition to being a liar? The scenario would be Kerry sitting in his boat somewhere in Vietnam, imagining that the people shooting at him are Khmer Rouge and sending missives to his superiors from "inside Cambodia". I don't think so.
Kerry's father also hated this country. A trait that was clearly passed on.
---I noticed that kerry's spokesRATs (juan williams in this case) are now claiming that maybe kerry just thought he was in Cambodia when he really wasn't. ---
That's right, Juan. And Kerry just thought the CIA was ordering him to be silent about it, when he was shuttling CIA agents in and out of Cambodia.
This is what he told the Associated Press in 1992:
By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border
of South Vietnam into Cambodia.
"We were told, `Just go up there and do your patrol. Everybody was over there
(in Cambodia). Nobody thought twice about it," Kerry said. One of the missions,
which Kerry, at the time, was ordered not to discuss, involved taking CIA
operatives into Cambodia to search for enemy enclaves.
"I can remember wondering, `If you're going to go, what happens to you,"'
Kerry said.
---That's right, Juan. And Kerry just thought the CIA was ordering him to be silent about it, when he was shuttling CIA agents in and out of Cambodia. ---
When you see the clever people grasping at such thin, unpromising straws you know the game is up. It amazes me that they never thought about any of this. These stories were out there and they just cheered Kerry through the nominating process without a second thought.
Proof, once again, that liberalism causes mental illness.
Bump!
Just your normal war hero, war criminal, war protester, factual time line problem. Hard to keep all the dates and times in proper sequence. Besides, we know that Nixon would have ordered it if he were the president at the time; so this is a minor discrepancy that should not bear directly on Lt. Kerry's credability or fitness to hold office...</Sarcasm>
Look in the middle of the article... Kerry claims that, in 1954, at age 11 he went on another unauthorized excursion across a border: into East Berlin! Absurd.
I already did that with a little animation of Michael Moore -
I have a lot of respect for Terry Gilliam.
Regards, Ivan
They are very used to telling whatever lies they feel like telling and not having them challenged. How long did they own practically every media outlet in the country? 90% of the press might as well be considered a branch of the DNC, down from a high of 99%.
At every Campaign stop, Kerry should be met with protesters chanting,...
This lie is a real chink in his armor. It shows he is certifiably delusional. He is embellishing his lies with props!
bump
Thanks ! Fabulous.
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