Posted on 11/01/2004 7:20:41 PM PST by artemiss
Sen. John Kerry’s paternal grandfather, Fred Kerry, was born Fritz Kohn, a European Jew. Kohn changed his name to Kerry and his religion to Catholic before immigrating to the United States, an auspicious choice for a family setting-up shop in America’s most Irish Catholic state, Massachusetts. In the new world Fred Kerry was successful in business and finance, later lost his fortune, started over again, failed once more and prospered all over again. Far-sightedness, perseverance and ambition, we begin to see, are prominent family traits.
Living in the Boston suburb of Brookline under the Kerry name, a name happened-upon by inspecting a map of Ireland before leaving for America, it was presumed by all that grandfather Fred was Irish, and even a newspaper account took his Irishness for granted. Grandfather Fred apparently never left a hint of his Jewish origins, even to his closest friends and associates. Failing to correct false impressions, as we will see, is another of a series of less attractive but no less prominent family traits.
Sen. John Kerry, grandson of Fred, claims to have learned he was one-half Jewish only in 2003 when, as a candidate for the presidency, a great deal of genealogical research was being conducted by Boston Globe reporters in preparation for a major biography. Presidential candidate Kerry's response to the Globe's unsealing his Jewish rather than presumed Irish heritage appeared to be wildly enthusiastic: "incredible stuff," "more than interesting," "a revelation," the senator exclaimed. For a generation accustomed to the postmodern nuances of ClintonSpeak, however, equivocal terms of this ilk are always subject to being deconstructed as less than unequivocally enthusiastic. What we do know is that none of John Kerry's closest family and friends had the least suspicion of his Jewish heritage prior to the Globe disclosure.
Grandfather Fred appears to have lost his fortune one last time after which he committed suicide under somewhat cloudy circumstances not yet thoroughly investigated by the intrepid Globe team; somewhat surprising given his Bostonian grandson's presidential proximity. Using one of the unlicensed handguns to which his gun control advocating grandson Sen. John Kerry is so opposed today, Kerry's formerly prosperous businessman grandfather, having made and then lost his fortune one too many times, shot himself in the head and died in the restroom of Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel. As indicated below, psychiatric disturbance may be one of the prominent Kerry family traits to which Fred Kerry was subject.
On John Kerry's maternal side, there is some interesting data tending to establish a pattern of aberrant character trait transmission across the generations, helping explain at least in part such disparate traits as Sen. Kerry’s proclivity for marrying heiresses of unimaginable wealth, his inclination to leave false impressions, his propensity to betray his country in time of war, his inclination to treasonously flee into the arms of enemy nations after siding with them against America and certain tendencies toward mental instability.
Sen. Kerry, Sen. Edwards, their wives and their campaign team relentlessly castigate President Bush for his being agnostic during the last presidential debate concerning the putative genetic basis of homosexuality. When asked by the debate moderator whether homosexuality is a matter of choice, President Bush committed the unpardonable sin of professing abject ignorance on the question. Under the New Dogmatism of the Kerry-Edwards team, doubt as to the heritability of personality and character traits is impermissible (even though the left almost universally condemns as racist research into the genetics of intelligence). Consequently, we harbor no doubt that Sen. Kerry, Sen. Edwards and their wives, so outraged over George Bush’s wavering on the question, will concur in the notion that traits such as treachery, imposture, pathological lying, unscrupulousness, overweening ambition, not to mention the propensity to marry wealthy women, all occupy specific loci on the bad character gene. Perhaps hypocrisy as well.
One very prominent ancestor of Sen. John Forbes Kerry on the maternal side, his namesake the Rev. John Forbes, the senator’s maternal great-great-great-great grandfather, served as the first magistrate to the governor of Florida in the latter part of the eighteenth century, covering the period of the American revolution. Sen. John Kerry apparently shared more than the first part of his name with the illustrious reverend.
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According to the authorized Boston Globe biography of John Kerry, with whose authors the senator accordingly cooperated, there are the following parallels between Sen. John Forbes Kerry and his forebears:
(1) “Marrying-up”. Just as the socially, financially and politically ambitious Sen. John Kerry married the billionaire heiress Teresa Heinz (his second such marriage to an extremely wealthy woman), so did his ancestor the Rev. John Forbes marry himself an extremely wealthy wife, a Massachusetts heiress, back in the eighteenth century.
(2) Sen. Kerry betrays his country and secretly meets with the enemy in Paris. Kerry and the other members of his family all opposed the Vietnam War before he joined the military. Kerry wrote of his own opposition in an article published in the Harvard Crimson. He entered the military having already formed what fellow Swift Boat commander Larry Thurlow termed a carefully crafted "master plan" for his political career. According to Thurlow, “it became apparent early on that John Kerry had a master plan that went far beyond the service in the Swift Boats, and because of the fact that he was trying to engineer a record.”
(a) In 1968 Kerry would enter active military service in Vietnam, thereby obtaining the political credentials necessary to credibly subvert the American effort to win the war from the inside. As the transcript of the 1971 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing demonstrates, the Kerry plan was highly effective. One of the most influential senators on the Committee, Jacob Javits of New York, remarked, “I wish to associate myself with the statement Senator Symington made when I was here as to your credentials. That is what we always think about with a witness and your credentials couldn't be higher…. It is not as effective unless you have those credentials. The kind you have. I couldn’t think of anybody whose testimony I would rather have and act on from the point of view of what this is doing to our young men we are sending over there.”
(b) While in Vietnam as a Swift Boat commander, Kerry fraudulently obtained, under highly questionable circumstances, three Purple Hearts within just four months for what are now known to have been (unintentionally) self-inflicted and no-bleed band-aid quality injuries. These medals provided him on technical grounds the opportunity to request and obtain an expedited ticket out of Vietnam. As former Republican presidential nominee and severely injured WW II war hero Bob Dole observed, “three Purple Hearts and [Kerry] never bled that I know of. I mean, they're all superficial wounds. Three Purple Hearts and you're out [of Vietnam].” Kerry turned against his own country, lied about witnessing systemic atrocities, and denounced his fellow soldiers and veterans as drug-addicted baby-killers, sociopaths, war criminals, misfits, torturers and "monsters."
(c) While still in the service of his country as a member of the Naval Reserve, and without authorization from his superiors, Kerry left his own country to secretly meet with enemy leaders overseas in time of war.
(d) Kerry likened the communist leader of North Vietnam to American Revolutionary War leader, and first president, George Washington.
Ancestor Rev. John Forbes flees to England. From the Boston Globe biography we learn that, just as Sen. Kerry betrayed his country during the Vietnam War, so did his maternal great-great-great-great grandfather oppose the American Revolutionary War, granting his loyalty not to his fellow Americans but to the British and, in the words of Kerry's Globe biographers, the esteemed reverend "fled Florida in 1783 and returned to England where he died within months. Such was the inauspicious beginning of the Kerry family in America."
(3) Psychiatric illness and treatment: Grandfather Fred Kerry and John Kerry . As we have seen, paternal grandfather Fred Kerry committed suicide. Since his time in Vietnam, John Kerry appears to have also suffered from psychiatric symptoms of an unspecified nature, severity and chronicity as reported in The Washington Post. According to his second wife, Teresa, John Kerry may have undergone psychiatric treatment with medication or other forms of therapy for symptoms she has personally witnessed since their marriage in 1995, putatively related to Vietnam War “trauma.” Wife Teresa describes John’s violent nightmares, “I haven't gotten slapped yet . . . but there were times when I thought I might get throttled.” Sen. Kerry was instrumental in propagating the false notion that Vietnam vets are disproportionally suicidal and suffer from increased liability to a variety of mental and social pathologies, (and seems to have contributed to establishing the questionable diagnostic category known as PTSD) but when pressed on whether he has undergone psychiatric treatment himself he is strikingly evasive. According to the Washington Post, “Asked if he has been in therapy himself, he non-answers, ‘It doesn't bother me anymore, I just go back to sleep’.” To Dr. Sydney Smith, physician-publisher of MedPundit, this “is the most disturbing aspect of the Teresa Heinz Kerry anecdote. It suggests he has yet to come to terms with the question himself.” To the contrary, this impresses us as a legitimate concern and a serious potential threat to his political viability. The mainstream news media has not pressed him on the matter of his psychiatric history. In spite of this failure, the Kerry campaign felt no inhibition in releasing the psychiatric records of a leader of the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth active in opposing his candidacy, as reported in the New York Daily News. It is interesting to note that one of Kerry’s favored weapons against his political opposition, beginning in the days of his protests against the Vietnam War, has been to smear his opponents in general, and Vietnam veterans in particular, as suicidally crazed or criminally inclined, vagrants and derelicts, drug addicts and maniacs. He used this slander technique in 1971 as part of the process of vilifying all Vietnam veterans in order to gain himself a national political platform, and he applies the same technique today to distract from his refusing to answer the charges of the rest of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that he is an impostor who fraudulently obtained his medals and his early release from combat duty inVietnam, and then proceeded to defame his fellow soldiers and POWs. Speaking to the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, on September 10, 2004 and holding in his hand a copy of his best-selling book "Unfit for Command," Swift Boat Veterans for Truth leader John O'Neill explained, “I'm going to suggest to you that the reason [Kerry] hasn't answered a single thing about this book, is that there is no answer to what's in this book--this book is absolutely the truth…. That's why he hasn't answered the book.--How has he reacted? He has reacted with a series of vicious attacks on the messenger. [The Kerry campaign] leaked information to the New York Daily News about a fifteen year ago suicide, attempted suicide, by one of the signers of our letter.”
Whether Sen. John Kerry inherited any of his paternal grandfather's self-destructive tendencies is unknown--apart from the senator’s consistent and relentless suicidal compulsion to dismantle every facet of America’s military, intelligence and nuclear capability in the face of the gravest imaginable threats from tyrannies and terrorist organizations spanning the decades from the Cold War through the current War on Terrorism. We do know, however, that he has suffered from highly disturbing symptoms, though documentation on the precise nature of these symptoms and any treatment for them has been scrupulously hidden from an indifferent press corps.
There are any number of other negative character traits that might be traceable either to the mental instability of Sen. Kerry's grandfather Fred, or the disloyalty of his namesake the Rev. John Forbes. These reportedly include qualities as seemingly innocent as a remote and aloof manner and a group of more serious character flaws including a tendency to various forms of fraud and imposture, pathological lying. The following is a list of a few such character traits:
(1) At the time of his Vietnam War protests, Kerry affected a transparently fake and affected high Boston accent, shibboleth of any aspiring JFK-monogrammed wannabe from Boston. The accent is accompanied by pronunciation anomalies precipitously adopted by the ambitious presidential aspirant from Massachusetts while at Yale and subsequently preserved throughout his anti-Vietnam War days. These anomalies are exemplified by his substitution of the soft Yale-inspired Jen-jis Khan for the familiar Genghis Khan. According to Kerry's childhood schoolmate Brit Hume of Fox News this accent did not exist at all before the would-be president's Yale days and his anti-Vietnam War testimony. Of course, there remains not the slightest trace of it today. Hume suggests, “Kerry speaks with an accent which he didn't have when I knew him when we were little boys together--and he doesn't have now, but he had then--it's quite striking. And I'm not sure it helps him.” This Vietnam era pronunciation affectation has been described by his Boston Globe biographers as a "deep Boston accent, even though Kerry had spent most of his life outside the state," as a result of which, the biographers continue, Kerry sometimes "sounded eerily like [John F.] Kennedy" (p. 31), with whom he shared the initials JFK. Robert F. Worth of The New York Times dryly comments that, these days, Kerry has shed “the upper-class drawl of his youth,” but Worth blurs the dramatic transformation, adding “but his soft vowels and formal diction still hint at a privileged lineage.”
Only The New York Times would feel the need for a cover-up to conceal Kerry’s voice change operation in much the same way an embarrassed mother might conceal her son’s sex change operation.
Peggy Noonan acutely observes, “Mr. Kerry has a problem with rhetoric. He doesn't have his own sound. You may hate Mr. Bush's sound but it's his, and a lot of people like it. He sounds normal, which for all its pluses and minuses as a style does tend to underscore the idea that he is normal…. JFK himself came forward as JFK. He didn't present himself to the world with a cigarette-holder, a jut-jawed chin and rimless eyeglasses. That is to say, he did not make believe he was FDR, the party's giant who'd died just 15 years before. JFK knew to be JFK. Kerry should be Kerry. This is assuming there is a Kerry. For argument's sake, let's.”
"Without reprieve, adjudged to death, For want of well-pronouncing shibboleth." - Judg. 12:1-6. Kerry channeled his old idol, John F. Kennedy, too, his well-modulated radio announcer's voice abruptly morphing into JFK's high-Boston accent, turning "ideas" into "idears." - Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2004.
(2) Kerry's unconvincing present-day attempts at everyday folksiness and hipness: (a) dropped g's such as nothin' for nothing; (b) a surplus of antiquated hipster expressions such as "Hey, man," and 60's gestures such as recently taking a drag on an "air joint." as well as (c) the presidential candidate’s incessant use of sportsy "gut-checking" variants, especially his insufferably repetitious real-man references to feeling what's in his "gut;" (d) simulations of Kennedy family sports, except that in Kerry's case this takes the form not of playing on the lawn, but of ostentatious athletic posing on every airport tarmac campaign stop. Typically, Kerry and an aide can be seen incongruously playing catch in the plane's shadow while dressed in business attire. Noonan’s revealing observations are again apposite, "Mr. Kerry is one of those rare public men who never get over self-consciousness in public. He's also that rare athlete who seems to lack physical grace. . . . He seems affected because he's self-conscious, and this is compounded by an air of premeditation.... He seems to be enacting sports more than enjoying them. He always seems to be enacting rather than enjoying."
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(3) Kerry has been attempting to convince the electorate that he is pro-gun (witness the recent goose hunt in Ohio), tough on defense (“I will never let those troops down and will hunt and kill the terrorists wherever they are,” and in favor of middle-class tax cuts (at the second presidential debate St. Louis, Missouri, October 8, 2004, when asked by an audience member at the townhall-style debate if he would agree to “look directly into the camera and using simple and unequivocal language, give the American people your solemn pledge not to sign any legislation that will increase the tax burden on families earning less than $200,000 a year during your first term,” the Senator gamely adopted a choir boy countenance and swore to the folks at home, “Absolutely, yes. Right into the camera, yes. I am not going to raise taxes…. I mean, you got to stand up and fight somewhere, folks. I'm pledging I will not raise taxes.” This, from the senator from Massachusetts who is rated by the non-partisan National Journal as the most extremely liberal in the entire U. S. Senate, and by any measure has devoted his decades-long tax-hiking, gun-controlling, government-expanding, nuclear-freezing political career to advancing the liberal side of the liberal side on every issue of consequence to the polity.
(4) Sen. Kerry has done more than any living human being to besmirch the reputations of Vietnam veterans as deviants, drug addicts, misfits, vagrants and homicidal or suicidal maniacs when the truth is rather that, in the medical and scientific literature, the rates of homelessness, joblessness, psychiatric disorder, crime, suicide and homicide among Vietnam veterans have been conclusively demonstrated--in exhaustive studies conducted, for instance, by the U. S. Centers for Disease Control to be statistically equal to or lower than the rates for the rest of the American population; or, as retired U.S. Navy Seal captain and Vietnam veteran John Bailey put it, “more than any other person, John Kerry is responsible for the false image of Vietnam veterans as dysfunctional misfits. Kerry betrayed all of us when he returned from Vietnam.”
(5) The ever-gallant Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have demonstrated that on several key issues John F. Kerry has fraudulently obtained medals for purported injuries and acts of bravery to which he was not entitled, and has used those medals to obtain an early out from active duty in Vietnam after hardly four months—according to John O’Neill, the only Swift Boat crew member or officer to have served a small fraction of the required tour of duty during the entire Vietnam conflict, apart from those who suffered disabling injuries. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth make an extremely strong case that John Kerry was an impostor and faked the injuries that were the basis of the medals he received. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth also question why Kerry refuses to sign Form 180, to release all of his service records to explain the many discrepancies and also to explain why his discharge was delayed as a result of which he received it many years after it would normally have been granted.
(6) John Kerry repeatedly claimed that he had illegally penetrated Cambodian waters on Christmas eve of 1968, as part of then-President Nixon's secret extension of the Vietnam War, explaining that this memory was “seared in” his brain. This claim has been proven utterly false, as recently acknowledged even by Kerry’s most vehement defenders--not to mention the fact that Nixon was not even president at the time. It is Kerry’s oft-repeated explanation that the memory of an event that never occurred is burned into his memory that makes one wonder whether the senator is delusional or just a fraud.
(7) in 1971, Kerry provided overwhelmingly false and misleading, and in many instances fraudulent, testimony to the U. S. Senate as to widespread, systematic and officially sanctioned atrocities committed in Vietnam by virtually all Americans serving there in combat throughout the war. Kerry and his fellow protest organizers in the VVAW contrived this slanderous testimony during the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings that he supervised, even though a large proportion of those who provided accounts of supposed atrocities were not combat Vietnam veterans, in some cases not veterans at all, refused to prepare legal affidavits or in a variety of other ways demonstrably dissembled. When finally pressed on the matter, however, Kerry acknowledged on television that he had himself repeatedly committed genuine war crimes in Vietnam. As with his Cambodia recollections, such testimony raises questions about whether Swift Boat commander John Kerry simply lied about alleged war crimes or fell victim to delusional forms of thinking and remembering.
They told stories that 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 a 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. - Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971. (8) In an interview with Charlie Gibson, host of ABC’s Good Morning America program, Kerry was confronted with lies and imposture regarding his throwing away his medals during 1971 anti-war protests in Washington organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Interviewed at the time of the protests, he confirmed that he had thrown his own medals. Years later, Kerry claimed that he pitched only his ribbons and that “medals” stands for ribbons and medals equally. Later, when confronted with eyewitness testimony that he had flung medals and not only ribbons, he first denied it vociferously and finally admitted that he did throw medals but that they belonged to one or more other soldiers and only the ribbons were his. In so doing he at least implicitly acknowledged that when it fit his own political interests he intentionally and misleadingly led onlookers and the media representatives who interviewed him to falsely conclude that he tossed his own medals, and then later, equally misleadingly, denied he jettisoned any medals when denial seemed to better suit those same political interests. Only Kerry himself knew the secret distinction between his own medals, and those of others, a distinction that enabled him to both affirm and deny throwing away medals. Once again, he displayed his ancestral trait of intentionally leaving false impressions. Ever since the 1971 incident, Kerry displayed that precocious and pre-Clintonian gift for postmodern ambiguities, nuances and equivocal interpretations of words such as medals and ribbons for which he has recently gained so much renown in the matter of the $87 billion Supplemental appropriation for the Iraq War. In a statement reminiscent of Bill Clinton's claim that he smoked but did not actually inhale marijuana, Kerry also explained to Gibson that originally he was only in favor of placing the medals gently on a table before he relented later and reluctantly agreed to heave them over the fence.
Here it is quite difficult to separate simple dissimulation and quibbling from psychiatrically significant delusional thinking and remembering. Did Kerry “remember” throwing medals even though he later changed his story to ribbons? When forced to admit he actually threw medals, did he really remember other soldiers who asked him to toss their medals? When he first asserted that he threw away the medals and later claimed the term “medals” covers ‘ribbons,’ did he genuinely believe this to be the case? When he later claimed that he wanted to gently deposit medals on a table but was rebuffed by his fellow organizers, did this debate really occur and can it be corroborated by others? When he told the story of other soldiers who asked him to fling their medals during the protest, we may not only ask why they would not want to toss their medals themselves, but whether these soldiers actually exist--can they be produced for purposes of corroboration?
(9) Obtaining an annulment of his first marriage to the mother of his children that involved a claim before God that his marriage of nearly two decades never occurred and his children are not the legitimate offspring of that marriage.--Is this not another form of fraud for expediency’s sake?
Finally, Sen. Kerry inadvertently disclosed his own dying mother's revelatory concerns for his lapsed integrity during his third and final debate of the 2004 presidential campaign with President Bush:
And she looked at me from her hospital bed and she just looked at me and she said, "Remember: integrity, integrity, integrity. "Those are the three words that she left me with." - John F. Kerry, Third Presidential Debate, 2004 This encounter with his mother occurred just a couple of years ago. Why would a dying mother administer an intense, penetrating stare, and why would she triple-repeat-for-emphasis the word "integrity" to a son who was embarking on a presidential campaign.--And why the admonitory, "Remember" so meaningfully imparted?
What explanation could there possibly be other than a concerned mother's intent to convey most searingly the fact that she harbored the gravest doubts as to her son’s "integrity;" mustn't she have fretted that this was John Kerry's Achilles heel, the one thing her son's character defects would compel him to abjure, whether in his antecedent 1971 testimony or in an anticipated presidential contest in which his integrity would be put to the test?
In the end John Kerry leaves us only with questions.
Is the image we see of John Kerry a reflection of what his mother wanted, a man of integrity? Is he the reflection of paternal grandfather Fred Kerry, the suicidally unstable man of unbridled but failed ambition? Or is he the descendant of the Benedict Arnold-like anti-American Rev. John Forbes, the great-great-great-great grandfather who so ambitiously married up but sold-out his country and whose ignominious end marks the true starting point of John Kerry’s quest for the presidency?
John Kerry must have the gene that makes him a turncoat and waffle.
Looks like Kerry belongs in the Nut House ... not the White House!
I had a feelin thar was sumptin a-matter wit dis guy...
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