John Kerry on CNN (clarification on Dems' position)

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/1/20/131219.shtml

What You Don’t Know About John Kerry
Chuck Noe, NewsMax.com

Here are facts and quotations that reveal the character of the new Democrat leader.

Denouncing America with ‘Hanoi Jane’: Although Wesley Clark and others have attacked former front-runner Howard Dean as a draft-dodging ski bum, Kerry is far more complex than the simple war hero he portrays himself as.
He became a celebrated organizer for one of America's most extreme appeasement groups, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He consorted with the likes of “Hanoi” Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s radical former attorney general.

He attended a seminar bankrolled by Fonda in Detroit in February 1971. Watching 125 self-proclaimed Vietnam veterans testify at a Howard Johnson’s about atrocities allegedly committed by U.S. forces, the man who would be president later said he found the accounts shocking and irrefutable.

Dubbed “The Winter Soldier Investigation,” the protest attracted minimal media attention, according to the Los Angeles Times, because Fonda insisted it be held in the remote Michigan city rather than the less “authentic” Washington, D.C.

Still, the event gave Kerry an idea for a protest that was sure to be a media smash, and he immediately set out to organize one of the most confrontational protests of the war.

Operation Dewey Canyon III began on April 18, 1971, when nearly 1,000 Vietnam veterans and people claiming to be veterans gathered on Washington’s Mall for what they called “a limited incursion into the country of Congress.”

The group staged mock firefights on the steps of the Capitol and Supreme Court and defied U.S. Park Police after the Department of Justice issued an injunction barring it from camping on the Mall.

Those evil American soldiers: Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971, Kerry claimed that U.S. soldiers had “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, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

‘We are not the best’: In his testimony, Kerry claimed there was no communist threat and said: “In 1970 at West Point Vice President Agnew said ‘some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse,’ and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion, and hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country ….”
U.S. Veteran Dispatch noted in 1996: “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.”

Throw as I say, not as I do: On that same day he led members of VVAW in a protest during which they threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the U.S. Capitol.
Kerry later admitted the medals he threw were not his. To this day they hang on the wall of his office.

Communist stooge: The communist Daily World delightedly published photos of him speaking to demonstrators and boasted that the marchers displayed a banner depicting a portrait of Communist Party leader Angela Davis, on record stating, “I am dedicated to the overthrow of your system of government and your society,” the New American recalled in May 2003.
“By frequently participating in VVAW’s demonstrations, Kerry found himself marching alongside what the Boston Herald Traveler identified as ‘revolutionary Communists.’ While noting that known Reds had openly organized these events, the December 12, 1971 Herald Traveler reported the presence of an ‘abundance of Vietcong flags, clenched fists raised in the air, and placards plainly bearing legends in support of China, Cuba, the USSR, North Korea and the Hanoi government.’"

Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry says: “As a national leader of VVAW, Kerry campaigned against the effort of the United States to contain the spread of Communism. He used the blood of servicemen still in the field for his own political advancement by claiming that their blood was being shed unnecessarily or in vain.

“Under Kerry's leadership, VVAW members mocked the uniform of United States soldiers by wearing tattered fatigues marked with pro-communist graffiti. They dishonored America by marching in demonstrations under the flag of the Viet Cong enemy.”

Sen. John McCain revealed that his North Vietnamese captors had used reports of Kerry-led protests to taunt him and his fellow prisoners. Retired General George S. Patton III angrily noted that Kerry’s actions had “given aid and comfort to the enemy.”

In recent years when Kerry has exploited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for photo opportunities on Veterans Day, some veterans, still outraged by his betrayal, have turned their backs on him.

The book he doesn’t want you to see: When Kerry ran for election to the U.S. House of Representative in 1972, “he found it necessary to suppress reproduction of the cover picture appearing on his own book, The New Soldier. His political opponent pointed out that it depicted several unkempt youths crudely handling an American flag to mock the famous photo of the U.S. Marines at Iwo Jima,” according to Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry.
“Suddenly, copies of the book became unavailable and even disappeared from libraries. But the Lowell (Mass.) Sun said of the type of person shown on its cover: ‘These people spit on the flag, they burn the flag, they carry the flag upside down, [and] they all but wipe their noses with it in their efforts to show their contempt for everything it still stands for,’” the New American reported.

Even today it is hard to find this infamous photo and book.

http://www.flightskills.com/rvn25.html

Debunking Some Myths About Anti-Vietnam War Protestors

For me, as a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, the most odious thing about the 25th anniversary of its end has been the endless media parade of leftover anti-Vietnam War protestors. They are all over television and in print, recounting the story of their brave, noble and ultimately successful struggle for peace and justice against an oppressive establishment.

There is only one thing wrong with this picture. It is a crock.

Former anti-Vietnam War protestors are using their positions of power and influence in the media, academe and the Clinton administration to try to revise history and hide the truth about their movement. Here are the biggest of their myths and the truths behind them:

Myth: They were protesting for peace. Fact: the anti-Vietnam War movement was not a pro-peace movement it was an anti-USA movement. Remember the Viet Cong flags? The posters of Ho Chi Minh? Jane Fonda posing on an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi? Former anti-Vietnam War protestors want you to forget these images, because they show clearly that the movement was calling not for peace by for a Vietnamese Communists victory and a US defeat. Wanting the US to lose also means that they wanted American servicemen to die - there is no escaping that conclusion.

Myth: The anti-Vietnam War protestors were free thinkers, bravely challenging the conventional wisdom and entrenched authority. Fact: When interviewed, they all drop the same telling comment: "Everybody I knew was against the Vietnam War." The truth is that support for the Vietnamese Communists and hatred of the US was the conventional wisdom on college campuses during the Vietnam War, and it required absolutely zero personal courage and moral fiber to take that stance. Strangely enough, that is still the case today.

Myth: They were noble and pure, occupying the moral high ground. Fact: Torched ROTC buildings. Trashed university administrative offices. Rocks and bottles thrown at police by rioting mobs. All more images that the anti-Vietnam War protestors would like you to forget. In America, everyone has a right to protest. The anti-Vietnam War protestors went beyond protest into rioting, arson and vandalism.

Myth: The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were not so much Communists as they were nationalists, certainly preferable to the evil, corrupt South Vietnamese government. Fact: After the Vietnamese Communists won they executed thousands of their people, sent hundreds of thousand of them to "re-education' camps, and installed a totalitarian police state and socialist economic system that would have made Stalin proud. Two million Vietnamese fled the new regime, most hoping to come to the USA. It was not nationalism and "agrarian reform" they were fleeing, it was torture, political repression, economic hardship and death.

The war has been over for a quarter of a century, the U.S. trade embargo ended nine years ago, and relations between Hanoi and Washington have been "normalized." Yet, even with all of their excuses gone, the Vietnamese government remains a brutal and oppressive police state, and the Vietnamese people continue to suffer economic hardship and political repression as a result. Not the happy Vietnam free of foreign devils that the anti-Vietnam War protestors predicted but rather exactly the human rights disaster that the supporters of the Vietnam War warned would result from an American pullout.

Myth: We lost the war, which proves that in the end the anti-Vietnam War protestors were right. Fact: We lost the war because of incompetent and uncommitted political and military leadership. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, McNamara, Kissinger, and Westmoreland were not FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and MacArthur. It also did not help that the anti-Vietnam War protestors and their allies in the media clouded the issues surrounding the war (as they continue to do today) and that America's so-called leadership had neither the will nor the smarts to counter these deceptions.

Well, so what? Why not bury the past and let bygones be bygones. Why not just let the healing begin? Because letting the former anti-Vietnam War protestors succeed in their campaign to be remembered as Quakers with love beads and tie-dyes rather than as the America-hating, radical left-wing fifth columnists that they were gives them a moral authority and influence over public opinion and policy that is undeserved and dangerous. This is not just some musty historical debate waged between aging and irrelevant antagonists. The history that the former anti-Vietnam War protestors hope to revise has practical lessons that are still relevant to America today. If we let them succeed, they will obscure the truth about the Vietnam War, whose real mistakes we will then be doomed to repeat.

Rats never talk in front of the Troops because they don't want to get BOOOOOOOD!!

Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters

"When former Attorney General Ramsey Clark isn’t defending Saddam Hussein, or giving speeches for the crypto-Stalinist International ANSWER, he’s acting as counsel for the Palestine Liberation Organization, trying to prevent families of murdered Jews from collecting on judgments against the PLO."
Little Green Footballs ^ | November 28, 2005 | Charles Johnson

From Kerry's "The New Soldier":

Al Hubbard Sgt., 22 Troop Carrier Squadron Aug. ’65-June ’66
Emotions: Walking down the flight line at Saigon past stacks of aluminum cases containing American bodies and past stacks of aluminum luggage containing American currency. Seeing the tight, sad face of an Airman loading the bodies aboard a dirty Air Force Transport and the wide smiling face of a stewardess greeting the passengers aboard a clean Pan American Clipper Jet. Hearing a Vietnamese beg you to leave his country and an American colonel tells you to bomb his country. Hearing a Vietnamese invite you to live in his home, after the war and an American explain why you can’t live in his block, after the war. Flying over barren, brown, safe American held terrain and over lush, green unsafe enemy terrain. Feeling happy to be leaving a country in which you do not belong and sad to be returning to a country in which you are not allowed to belong. Sacrificing a portion of your consciousness so you won’t have to deal with being there and building mental blocks so you won’t have to deal with having been there.

- Al Hubbard, proven fraud who never set foot in Viet Nam. The only Vietnamese he ever met was when he was collaborating with the North Vietnamese in Paris on the American Communist Party's nickel.

John Kerry's explanation: "He (Hubbard) simply exaggarated his particular position. But nobody knew it at the time. And those things happen."

Free online version of
hanoi kerry's playbook "The New Soldier"
You can read it online right now.

Got all that, Tonk and thanks. What I was looking for was the video interview with Adm Hoffman....and others describing Kerry's duties, performance and early departure.
While Kerry's method of 'bugging out' was distasteful to Command, they wanted him out of there.

Do they really think the American public is so stupid as to not remember LAST WEEK?
Sadly , a HUGE portion of the American is just that stupid. Look how many DID vote for him . People don't care . If they hate Bush , then logic , facts , history or sense don't matter one iota. That's why the dems say the most absurd things. They know millions of morons just go along with it. I know better, you know better , but many don't .I argue with folks like that every day here in the NYC area.people who believe ANYTHING the left throws out there. Insane or not , hey believe it .

"John Kerry was just giving a counter speech on CNN and clarified the Dems' position on the Iraq war."

Democrats are forever "clarifying" their positions because they have no firm principles.

Which is to say, no foreign government would take a Democratic President's threats seriously in today's world. A threat here, a "clarification" there...

I haven't read this yet, but I suspecdt it's going to hurt.

Kerry thinks he's still a viable candidate for 2008.

And I still think the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders are going to show up at my place.

"And I still think the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders are going to show up at my place."

This illustrates the difference between the absolutely impossible (Kerry) and the merely highly improbable (Cheerleaders).

"Ugh....."

I argue with folks like that every day here in the NYC area

Sigh. You are right. I remember doing the same in NJ ALL the time. And look who they just voted into the Governor's office, lol!