The pretender

Curt Mudgeon

May 2004

Meet John F. Kerry, Democrat presidential candidate, as his campaign propaganda describes him.  A patrician from Massachusetts, he is wealthy, but fights for the middle class and the poor in the name of social justice.  He is a Vietnam war hero, with three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star, but loathes wars.  He is an avowed environmentalist who attended Earth Summits on global warming.  He is a tolerant Catholic who thinks that abortion, which he disapproves, is nevertheless a woman’s right.  He is a sophisticate, a man of the world, which makes him fit to lead the most powerful country on Earth.  As a child, he went to school in Switzerland and spent his summer vacations in Brittany.  He has a French cousin, speaks French, has read the French philosophers, and can quote André Gide, his favorite French writer, at the drop of a hat.  He looks fastidiously serious, as a leader should, and his political experience includes twenty years in the US Senate after serving as lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts and as a district attorney.  An internationalist, he believes that the UN can resolve world conflicts.  World leaders have informed him of their hopes that he will beat George W. Bush in the November election.  His charming wife can speak five foreign languages.  Teresa Heinz-Kerry, through the Heinz foundation, is an advocate for women’s rights, the environment, education, the arts, social progress, health care, and more.  She met John in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio, where he captured her attention by responding in French to a comment she had inadvertently made in that tongue at the dinner table. 

This portrait of the senator is that of a man of Democrat enlightened modernity, a leader in tune with the mood of the country as the party sees it, and a soldier who knows the realities of war.  Mr Kerry had an easy time in the primaries.  The “debates” never really debated or revealed anything of substance about the candidates or their platforms, Mr Kucinich being the lone exception.  They only served as settings for the contenders to outdo one another in exercises of shrill vituperation, invective, and denouncement directed at the president.  In the end, the primaries left the senator’s image practically unquestioned.

Under such circumstances, it is somewhat surprising that, according to polls, the candidate’s popularity does not quite match his glowing image, even with the help of the anti-Bush juggernaut led by the not-so-loyal opposition and the press, which made the president’s rating drop to an all-time low.

Trying to find anything exciting or novel in Mr Kerry’s platform is futile.  He wants to raise taxes, which is the wrong thing to do to an economy just recovering from a recession.  To make his proposal somewhat palatable, he bets on class envy, the oldest trick in the Left’s bag. In his sights are “the rich” with annual incomes over $500,000. There would seem to be some progress there, as he had defined months ago the rich by incomes of $200,000 or more.  With this money, he claims to be able to fund an extensive health care plan, and to increase teachers’ salaries---teachers’ unions are probably the most powerful unions in the country.    He will also create millions of jobs with tax “incentives”---new taxes---that will prevent companies to contract the production of goods or services outside the United States.  Of course, these additional expenditures, which he calls “investments,” will have to find somewhere more funding than provided by the tax hikes.   In foreign affairs, the senator promises to mend our relations with France and Germany, which in his eyes are Europe---the rest does not count.  As to Iraq, the UN would take care of it by some miraculous change of resolve.  Note that the UN closed its office in Baghdad at the first sign that it could be the target of terrorist bombings.  In sum, we are left to assume either that France, Germany, and the UN would drive Mr Kerry’s foreign policy, or that his charismatic persona would suddenly generate a worldwide groundswell of love for the United States.  Only a sucker would bet on the latter proposition. 

The candidate’s voting record in the US senate does little to inspire enthusiasm. For the past twenty years, he has opposed tax cuts and defense appropriations for weapon systems now crucial to our military.  He was a co-signer of the infamous “Dear Commandante” letters to communist leader Daniel Ortega in opposition to President Reagan’s support of the Contras in Nicaragua.  After a trip to Managua with Tom Harkin, he also advocated direct negotiations between the United States and the Sandinistas essentially to starve the anti-communist insurgency and thereby harden the communist grip on the country.  Mr Kerry’s sympathies for the hard Left did not stop there.  He has also opposed US policies on Cuba and South America.  It is fair to say that the use of American power in the service of national interest makes him rather uncomfortable, as it did Mrs Albright, forgettable Secretary of State, who favored a subjection of US forces to UN whims and welcomed China’s military buildup “to balance” our superpower status.  Concerning the UN, Mr Kerry and Mrs Albright are on the same page of a foreign policy book that envisions a world under a UN rule enforced by American military might.  This is consistent with a 1970 interview by the Harvard Crimson where the senator describes his “internationalism.”  But it is not a view that he will advertise during the campaign.  

Consistently, Mr Kerry had equated criticisms of his political record with accusations that he is unpatriotic, which is silly but allows him to pull out of his sleeve the trump card of his service in Vietnam.  The “I served in Vietnam” mantra has been used and abused so much that it has become a joke on the late night shows.  Asked in an interview how he could understand the plight of the average American, he answered that in Vietnam he had been part of a “band of brothers” from all walks of life.  In a campaign trip to the South, he mentioned that the landscape reminded him of Vietnam. Early in his campaign, service in Vietnam was presented as a sine qua non qualification for the presidency, and used as the substitute for cogent answers to policy questions.  Of course, it was vigorously contrasted with the “sinecure” of Mr Bush’s stint in the National Guard as a fighter pilot on the F-102 interceptor.  And when one Michael Moore, leftist buffoon and Hollywood nasty propagandist, claimed that the president had been AWOL during his term of service, Kerry campaign surrogates spread the word as if it were fact.  The senator himself stated that such an accusation should be taken seriously and deserved an investigation.  Eventually, the president released the entirety of his military file, which showed that he had in fact done more time than required, and had received top ratings as a leader and as a pilot.  His unit had been activated for Vietnam when he entered flight school, but these orders were rescinded when the Air Force decided to phase out the F-102, which no longer fitted the demands of the war.  Anyhow, it must have come as news to fighter pilots that their training and practice are a sinecure.

The campaign’s use of the Vietnam record has somewhat tapered probably due to doubts expressed by combat veterans, which one of them succinctly summed up in the phrase “Three Purple Hearts and no limp!”  The three Purple Hearts, which had been obtained within a period of four months, had not caused any interruption of duty or hospital stay.  A military surgeon who examined the wound for which the senator had applied for his first Purple Heart described it as a band-aid injury. This naturally raised questions about the other two Purple Hearts.  To put an end to speculations, Mr Kerry announced that he would release to the press his military file hitherto sealed by his request.  That the part of the file made available did not answer the questions only fueled more speculation, including a suggestion that the wounds did not really justify the decorations, which in turn would have been used to secure an early return to the United States---three Purple Hearts were a ticket home.  And then, more veterans voiced their skepticism about the circumstances that led to the granting of the Silver Star.  Did the killing of an enemy wounded by .50 cal. twin-gun fire and whose sole weapon was an empty rocket launcher constitute gallantry in action?  The mainstream press did not pay much attention to these questions, perhaps because they might have been dismissed as Republican smear tactics or as the expression of an old grudge caused by Mr Kerry’s brand of antiwar activism upon his return from Vietnam.

In 1970, after a trip to Paris where he met Vietcong and North-Vietnamese officials participating in the peace negotiations, John Kerry joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), part of a motley leftist coalition that included the Communist Party-USA.  The following year, Mark Lane, a lawyer associated with subversive causes, called for a meeting in Detroit of the VVAW for the purpose of investigating war crimes committed by US troops in Vietnam. Funds to support the event had been raised by movie actors (Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland), popular musicians and singers (David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Phil Ochs), a comedian (Dick Gregory), and a few other lesser players.  “The Winter Soldier Investigation,” as it was called, produced a report where the testimonies of civilians and some hundred veterans showed that the American military routinely committed war crimes as a matter of policy.  Following the meeting, Mr Kerry, then member of the executive committee of the VVAW, spoke at rallies, helped raise money for the cause, and appeared on television to publicize the conclusions of the Winter Soldier meeting.  He also declared on camera that he, as most soldiers, had committed war crimes.  In a protest march in Washington DC that included simulations of alleged American atrocities against civilians, Mr Kerry and other veterans in a theatrical gesture of protest threw away their medals and ribbons in front of the Capitol.  It is at that time that the future senator appeared before the US senate Committee on Foreign Relations to regurgitate the findings of the Winter Soldier Investigation, which Sen Mark Hatfield of Massachusetts, a supporter of the VVAW, placed in the Congressional Record.  The news of alleged American atrocities, which were widely broadcast by the press, helped whip up crowds of protesters who ambushed returning veterans at a California airport to taunt them, spit on them, throw trash at them, and call them “baby killers.” Meanwhile, Mr Kerry made no bones about supporting the position taken by the North Vietnamese at the Paris peace talks. 

Predictably, all this did not sit well with Vietnam veterans who denounced the accusations as bogus.  And bogus they were.  A later investigation of the members of the VVAW who had testified at the Winter Soldier meeting revealed either that they were frauds, or that their testimonies were made up.  Most lied about their ranks, the units in which they served, and their combat experiences.  Some did not even go to Vietnam, including one who deserted from Europe and ended up in the maximum-security ward of a mental hospital for murder.  Others usurped the identity of veterans who had nothing to do with the Detroit event.  When confronted with these realities, Mr Kerry pointed out that, even if not true, the accusations of war crimes had helped to raise the public’s awareness about the legitimate urgency to end the war.   This recklessness speaks volumes about his character, that of a man who thinks nothing of defaming the whole US military to get his way, and in wartime to boot.  It just smacks of the political expediency typical of totalitarian regimes.  Is that what we want in a commander-in-chief?

The senator is at his best in homilies pompously senatorial in tone, in which he invariably assesses our country’s circumstances as dire and blames them on the president.  Forget the economic recovery.  The candidate contrived a tortuous “misery index” purported to show against all evidence that no recovery is taking place. The current rate of unemployment is unacceptable, he says, and jobs have been lost forever.  High gasoline prices impoverish the middle class, hit the poor the hardest, and will tank the economy.  The war in Iraq is a quagmire that will end in failure.  The air we breathe and the water we drink are poisonous.  If the news are good, Mr Kerry just makes up bad news.  He is a prophet of doom.  He has the lugubrious looks and mien of those characters who hector passers-by at street corners and hold a sign that reads THE END IS NIGH.  On the stump, defaming his opponent is his favorite tactic. The Republicans “are the worst liars [he has] ever seen.”  The president---an oilman, you know---is responsible for the high gasoline prices.  At a rally, he answered a man who inquired about the “world leaders” purported to favor his candidacy with a nasty “It is none of your business!”  He then went on to chide the man for having voted for President Bush in 2000.  This is outright arrogance.  Whatever Mr Kerry says or does on the political scene is our business. We pay his salary of US senator, we also pay for the perks that go with it, and we will pay for his post-convention campaign.  But how we vote is our own business, not his. 

For understandable reasons, the candidate has soft-pedalled his French connection. His cousin, one Brice Lalonde, is a leftist Green who served as Minister of the Environment in the socialist Mitterrand administration.  Could he have been the conduit for a discreet message of support from Jacques Chirac, “world leader” of sorts?  Now, that Mr Kerry’s favorite French writer is André Gide is certainly not the bit of news that should enthrall America, except the effete literati who equate sophistication with decadence, and French-style at that.  About a hundred years ago, Gide sent ripples throughout the French literary world with introspective, thinly-disguised autobiographical writings that defended homosexuality and preached hedonism and the abandonment of traditional morality.  He was a pederast, and had a good time at it in Algiers where he travelled with Oscar Wilde.  Gide has been enshrined as a pioneer of the novel as a vehicle of psychological analysis, and as a champion of individual “liberation.” Anyhow, it makes one wonder why Mr Kerry is so keen on Gide, an author antithetical to American culture.  If it is a pose to impress the French elites, it is a bit peculiar---who cares about the French elites?  If it accurately reflects the man’s cultural tastes, it is even more peculiar.  In either case, it exposes a French side of the senator that is a dubious asset in a race for the presidency of the United States.

Mr Kerry’s image would be incomplete without the mention of the fibs, equivocations, and deceptive changes of opinion that have pervaded his campaign.  The notorious military medals that he threw away with contempt in front of the Capitol were not his, but he may have thrown his ribbons or so he says.  He owns an SUV when he speaks in Detroit, but does not when he recommends high fuel-economy standards.  He voted for military appropriations, but actually did not. He complains about high gasoline prices, but used to advocate high prices by taxation to reduce consumption.  He recommends tapping our strategic oil reserves, but opposed such measures just a few years ago.  All that, of course, supposedly out of principle.

Character is probably the most important quality that we must seek in a presidential candidate in times of war, and Mr Kerry does not fit the bill.  A man who so easily dismissed the harm done by his involvement in the Winter Soldier scam is dangerous.  His internationalism is a threat to our sovereignty and national interests.  His platform devoid of substance suggests a yen for power for the sake of power.  His inflammatory, insulting rhetoric, which has become the accepted standard of his party, does not stem from passionate righteousness or sincerity.  It derives from a deep-seated nastiness. 

A Japanese proverb says that “when the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.”  I look, and I see Ted Kennedy, blubbery wreck from Massachusetts, whose voting record is to the right of John Kerry’s.  Ugh!