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Sept. 22, 2004 In recent months--actually, for the last year-- John Kerry has shown himself to be something less than a "rising star" in the Democrat Party. He's made extraordinary and unaccountable mistakes in his campaign. It's almost as if he WANTS to lose in November (not that I think that would be a bad thing.) He has the well-deserved reputation for flip-flopping on almost every conceivable issue--lots of those occurring during his campaign. First he was "for" the War against Terrorism, then he opposed it. Once he was in favor of regime change in Iraq and then he wasn't. He voted against Desert Storm and then for the current war in Iraq and then voted not to fund it. It's amazing that Democrat voters aren't suffering from whiplash. John F. Kerry's campaign unaccountably decided to use his Vietnam service as the centerpiece of his campaign. One can only surmise that's because he doesn't have much of a resume in the Senate to which to point . Not a single, significant piece of legislation has his name on it in nearly 20 years in the Senate. His principle claim to fame is as the junior Senator from Massachusetts, subordinate only to the second most liberal Senator in the country. Guess who qualifies as Number One! As it turns out, using Vietnam as his sole qualification as a wartime President was a serious blunder. He may have just forgotten that there are tens of thousands of Vietnam-era veterans who remember very well, not only what he did and didn't do while IN Vietnam, but the reprehensible manner in which he conducted himself after leaving for home. HIS mistake (beyond the stupidity of trashing his fellow vets) was apparently forgetting that there's a fairly comprehensive filmed, taped and written record of what he said and did subsequently. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a poorly- funded 527 group, has had an enormously negative effect on Kerry's campaign--in large measure because what they said had the ring of truth and was backed up by the official record--film and tapes of Kerry's perfidy, for example. Kerry's first book, "The New Soldier," written shortly after his Fulbright Committee testimony, shows Kerry and some hippy-looking guys in fatigues flying the American flag upside down on its cover. It's been out of print for some time and John F. Kerry has suppressed another printing-- even though it would, no doubt, sell lots of copies today. Copies of the book that are still in circulation are selling on E-Bay and Amazon for as much as $500 per copy--regardless of condition! One enterprising group is even selling CD copies of the book on Amazon. It's important, because it repeats the monsterous charges he made about other Vietnam vets in print. Unfortunately for him, it also repeats the lies he told about HIS service in Vietnam-- Christmas in Cambodia, "enemy fire" on December 2, 1969, and other such stuff. One would almost think that Kerry is deliberately self-destructing. He's wooden, looks VERY tired and his speeches are singularly uninspiring. His receptions are less and less enthusiastic as well. There are those who believe that former President Clinton's minions are trying their worst to insure Kerry's failure in November. The fact is, many of them (who were loyal enough to Clinton to literally take the Kool-aid for him) are now involved in the Kerry campaign. Mostly, these are his dirty-tricks squad, but the shift in the Kerry campaign seems designed more to insure his failure than his election. It's pretty well-established that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton CANNOT succeed in her White House ambitions for 2008 in the face of a Kerry win this year. Only if she's faced with a lame-duck, outgoing GOP President that year does she stand the slightest chance of being elected. That strategy could backfire if someone (Rudy Guilianni, for example) beats her when she's due to run for re-election to the Senate in 2006. You may have noticed that her voting record so far in the Senate has been almost conservative. If you don't believe that's planned to provide her the cover necessary to run in 2008, you don't know much about politics, and even less about Hillary's willingness to do virtually anything that'll put her back into the White House--even vote contrary to her natural, leftist inclinations. Kerry seems destined to failure this year, and not altogether because he's a singularly unfit candidate. It could be that he HAS to lose to open the door for Ms Clinton's future ambitions. ------------ About the author: David A. Jared is a news junkie, semi-retired and an avid golfer who's been writing his first book, "4000 years of chopsticks" for the last 20 years. Email: Pappadave@sbcglobal.net |
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