What did his superiors have to say about his service? Apparently, Lieutenant Kerry at least once was dressed down for recklessness in beaching his boat and unnecessarily risking his men. But he got his decorations and his reassignment stateside and, as soon as he could, joined the antiwar movement as a disgruntled antiwar veteran – never mind that he’d been against the war before enlisting! At subsequent hearings, he told stories of war crimes by American troops based on hearsay, claiming these were commonplace, not exceptions, angering many of his fellow Vietnam vets at the time. Today his staffers tell us he was young and eager to end the war back then and so we shouldn’t make too much of his past hyperbole.
So John Kerry presents himself as a genuine war hero who just happens to oppose war, including the one the U.S. fought in Vietnam and the 1991 Gulf War, which he subsequently told at least one constituent he really supported. He’s also the guy who threw his Vietnam era medals away in protest – except he really didn’t, since it turns out he still had them years later. Apparently he threw someone else’s away!
Kerry, of course, did vote for the Congressional resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to take military action against Saddam Hussein. But then, when he saw the traction Howard Dean’s antiwar stance was getting, he reversed course and told Democratic primary voters he didn’t really mean what the resolution he voted for said! And when it came time to vote funds to support the military action he had initially endorsed with his vote, he dutifully demurred. (Imagine how a vote “for” would have gone over by then with the vocal Democratic base he was busily trying to woo – the base so voraciously baying for Bush’s political blood?)
Senator Kerry and his supporters would have us believe that all this is somehow off-limits in debate. While it’s fine in their view to call George W. Bush a liar, a deserter, a betrayer of his country, etc., and to suggest that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance but let it happen anyway, or that he cooked up the removal of Saddam to gain political points (that’s rich, since it’s clearly Bush’s political albatross and any half-savvy politician, especially John Kerry, must know the risks American politicians run in supporting wars), still they want to tell us Kerry’s own history is out of bounds.
Indeed, shortly after he’d muttered, soto voce, his line about Republicans being “crooks” and “liars” without any evidence for such an outrageous claim, Kerry complained that “the Republican attack squad” was already gearing up to get him.
For Bush to make his case via a muted television commercial with fleeting images of the remains of the World Trade Center is somehow an affront to decency, the Kerryites tell us. But Kerry’s own never-ending invocation of his “heroic” history in Vietnam is just fine. Kerry’s the “patriot,” but Bush “betrayed his country.”
This is typical of the tenor of the opposition to Bush since he first became president. It’s always been about demeaning and negatively characterizing the current occupant of the White House. So Kerry is just following his own historical practice and grabbing the main chance, jumping onto the Bush-bashing bandwagon first driven out of the station by Howard Dean and amply supported by the likes of Michael Moore, Maureen Dowd, Molly Ivins, Al Franken, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Johnny Depp, Martin Sheen, Barbra Streisand and nearly every other left-leaning liberal pundit and Hollywood policy “expert” you can imagine.
But maybe Kerry’s latest potshots are really just about pre-emption? Maybe Kerry is just hoping to keep the Republicans so off-balance and on the defensive that his own history will never emerge as a real campaign issue, not even his numerous votes against defense spending but for higher domestic spending with increased taxes?