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Who’s worse — Kerry or the rest of us? Just a few critical days before the recent election, John Kerry spoke these fateful words at Pasadena City College: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” Kerry’s remarks were taken as an insult to those serving in our military unless you believe his explanation that it was a botched joke, and in the aftermath our media pursued it like the Keystone cops while Kerry’s fellow Democrats left him like rats from a sinking ship. The buzz is Kerry’s presidential aspirations might have ended with those brief remarks. A friend, who knows I oppose Kerry for any office anywhere, asked me how I felt about Kerry’s potentially fatal stumble. I told him I think the whole episode reflects more poorly on our media and the American people than on Kerry himself. He was puzzled, you probably are, too, so I’ll explain. To explain, I’ll focus on just a few of Kerry’s many antics. Ignore the 2004 arguments over whether Kerry manipulated events to score the medals he brought home from Vietnam. Forget about his double-invisible reverse on throwing his medals over a fence marked “trash” in protest. Disregard the Kansas City meeting Kerry attended in November 1971 in which assassination of U.S. senators was voted on as an anti-war measure; besides, to Kerry’s credit he voted no. Never mind Kerry’s anti-military voting record in the Senate. Let’s focus on just three events. First, In April 1971 Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Sen. Fulbright, a politician desperately seeking to discredit the war in Vietnam. Kerry testified about a Jane Fonda-sponsored event called “Winter Soldier” in which men representing themselves as Vietnam veterans told stories of atrocities, “... 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 fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam ...” Kerry also told the senators that “... war crimes committed in Southeast Asia ... not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command ...” Kerry’s testimony was not only completely false, he knew it was false because he helped fabricate it. Steve Pitkin of Boca Raton, Fla., was one who testified to atrocities at Winter Soldier, and since then has confessed that he actually didn’t see any atrocities at all in Vietnam, but that John Kerry personally pressed him to lie. Pitkin revealed that Kerry coached him at Winter Soldier on what war crimes to fabricate – rape, racism, brutality, artillery fire on civilians — and how to say it when the cameras turned on for Kerry to interview him. The news media and American public bought Kerry’s story because they were sick of the war. After Kerry became a household name from his famous testimony, those households likely never heard the news that several military investigations and efforts by investigative reporters followed up on Kerry’s testimony and found not one single credible atrocity in the Winter Soldier stories. They also found most of the “veterans” who testified were frauds; some had never been in the military, others had never been in Vietnam, some had been in Vietnam but never in combat. Just a few had actually been in combat in Vietnam but even their atrocity stories evaporated under scrutiny. Kerry’s entire story on war crimes in Vietnam was a lie, and he used it to launch his political career. He got away with it. More than any other individual, Kerry is responsible for the false negative stereotype of Vietnam veterans as dysfunctional misfits. Second, later that same year, while still an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve, while our troops were still fighting and dying, Kerry met with the enemy in Paris, apparently to coordinate anti-war activities in the U.S. He betrayed his country this time, and got away with it presumably because nobody had the backbone to prosecute. Jane Fonda had the same good fortune. The third event is Kerry’s recent gaffe at Pasadena City College. He said something that may have been an unintentional moment of honesty that exposed his long-standing disdain for the military. Or, if you believe his explanation, he clumsily screwed up a joke pointing a finger at President Bush. Either way, what does it say about our superficial news media and fickle American public that Kerry gets a pass for lying to Congress, smearing a generation of our troops and betraying his country, but has his political hopes dashed by a brief remark that breaks the rules of political correctness? Substance is irrelevant. Appearance is everything. How sad for all of us. login to post comments | Terry Garlock's blog
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