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Kerry's World: Father Knows Best***.........As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning, "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism."

........John Kerry, of course, did exactly this, first in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and eventually in the U.S. Senate. From the moment he arrived in Washington, Kerry promised that "issues of war and peace" would remain his passion. And, from the start, this meant that he would criticize Ronald Reagan's war against communism, especially when it was fought through proxies in the jungles of Central America. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandanista government, telling The Washington Post, "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell [the Sandinistas] what to do." Soon after his return, he pressured Congress into investigating the administration's illegal funding of the Contra rebels, opening a trail that culminated in the exposure of the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. And, a few years later, in the late '80s, he repeated this success, launching an investigation that revealed that another of the administration's favorite anti-communists, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, had been deeply enmeshed in drug-trafficking. Kerry was also skeptical enough of U.S. power that he voted against authorizing a popular intervention -- the Gulf war -- and opposed a 1995 resolution that would have allowed the arming of Bosnians. ........***

Vietnam...Today***..........But that claim has been proven false by the experience of the last three years, Smith argues. Vietnam's treatment of dissidents and religious minorities has gotten worse, not better, since diplomatic and trade relations with the United States were normalized in 2001. The Vietnam Human Rights Act "would be law right now if it hadn't been for Kerry," Smith says, "and some of those dissidents would be out of prison." By blocking the sanctions bill three years ago, Kerry ensured only that Hanoi's repression would continue unabated.

Will he block it again this year? The Kerry campaign hadn't replied to an inquiry as of late Friday, and Smith claims no inside knowledge. "But I know this much," he said the other day. "The best and brightest and bravest people in Vietnam are in prison, persecuted by the government for their opinions or their faith. And you don't do people who are suffering immeasurable cruelty any kindness by aiding a dictatorship."***

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"The New Soldier" electronic adaptation can be found here

The New Soldier (the book that John Kerry doesn't want anyone to read)***Here's your chance to own a first edition copy of The New Soldier by John Kerry. Three copies availabe from $727.95 to $2,502.95 Or you can read the book at Winter Soldier.com.

From the article:

Will voters decide that none of this — neither Kerry's service nor his anti-war crusading — really matters very much today?
Voters ultimately decided Bill Clinton's draft-avoiding activities as a college and grad student were not a disability that would keep him from becoming president.
If voters don't judge Kerry harshly for alleging war crimes as a 27-year old veteran, then perhaps they wouldn't harshly judge President Bush as a 26-year-old, if he missed part of his National Guard service. The National Guard allegations were already in the press during the 2000 campaign and Bush won the election despite it.

This article starts out with an attempt to present another side to the issue, one that the general public does not know about, but then it degenerated into a comparison of Kerry's actions with the old Bush-avoided-real-military-service lie. But hopefully the careful reader will begin to understand why veterans of those years are so determined today to continue to present their message.

How can any historian ignore statements like Kerry's made?

"In an interview on NBC's "Meet The Press" last Sunday, Kerry was asked about statements he made about Vietnam War atrocities during an interview with the same program in 1971, when he was a leader in the antiwar movement:"

"There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed, in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones, I conducted harassment and interdiction fire, I used .50-caliber machine guns which were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages," Kerry said in 1971.

Excerpt from CNN http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/25/hughes.kerry.vietnam/

11 posted on 08/22/2004 11:38:13 AM PDT by tobyhill (The war on terrorism is not for the weak!)

The "filthy, obscene memory" I have is of the VVAW and Kerry's testimony. My current nightmare is that he will be elected President.