The "John Kerry's gratuitous references to Vietnam" thread

First of all Kerry's campaign is not based solely on him being a decorated Viet Nam war hero. I don't remember who it was that listed link to all of Kerry's positions on many issues. I know that precludes Republicans from trying to define Kerry as running on his past heroic deeds, but that's not the case.

- The Iraq war. He has support from the country, and knew that he wouldn't be in any danger from it. I don't think that's courage at all. But even if it is, it's still poor decision making, and was carried out in a less than honest way.

- The immigration policy may have alienated some members of his own party, but to say that he would get no political gain from that is also not correct. The possibility of votes from large pockets of the hispanic community is certainly some political gain that the President would gain. Given that hispanics largely vote Democrat in national elections.

- The supporting of the amendment, isn't courageous at all. How is it courageous to try and stack the deck against a minority of people by denying them rights. A real courageous move would be to say that we need to move forward in a civil right's issue, and to support gay marriage.

Now for Kerry's political courage

- Took on a very popular President by the name of Ronald Reagan. He found the dirt on Reagan's administration and busted war hero, Oliver North. He had the courage to Nicaragua and investigate first hand what was going on there, despite a smear campaign from Republicans claiming that he and Tom Harkin were being used by Norriega.
http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/062003.shtml

- 1985 Author Civil Rights Protection Act to end discrimination based on sexual orientation.

- 1990- Cosponsor Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act

- 1994 Violence Against Women Act providing funding for shelters, hotlines, increased law enforcement and more.

- 1995 – Along with John McCain push for Normalization of Vietnam relations

- 1996 Women’s Health Equity Act

- Time Magazine's "Honest Man in Politics Award" for being only Senator up for reelection in 1996 to vote against Defense of Marriage Act
http://forum.johnkerry.com/index.php?showtopic=2623

- June 21, 2002
Parents for Residential Reform, Mass Families Organizing for Change and the Federation for Children with Special Needs presented The Powerful Friend Recognition Award to Senator Kerry "for his outstanding leadership and national voice on behalf of children with disabilities and their families".
http://kerry.senate.gov/text/about/accomplishments.html

This record shows a history of sticking up for groups who haven't had equal or fair representation, pushing for a stop to discrimination against homosexuals etc. That takes courage.

 

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=4448594

The reporter inserted the entire paragraph. There are no quotes around that particular statement in the original Reuters story.


"I am concerned," he told reporters. "I don't know if it's there or not but there's a lot of it around now. I think we have to be careful."

The four-term senator from Massachusetts hasn't had much time to see movies lately. He has been running for president virtually since the beginning of last year.

 

back on topic? I answered your direct request to list post '71 examples of Kerry's political courage.

I wans't taking anything off topic, but responding a request that you submitted.

 

OK, but the reporter scrupulously put quotes around John Kerry's words and did not put any around the reference to Vietnam. It's more likely in this case that the reporter decided to add that informational tidbit in the story. If the reporter was a lefty, they would have said, that war that GWB managed to miss, even though he was a minimally skilled pilot with mediocre grades who applied late for National Guard duty.

 

I included two quotes of yours. One was to illustrate my point about your back to the topic blow off of information you requested.

but back on topic
:
So the idea is that Kerry uses his Viet Nam service too much, so to illustrate that you insert a bit about Kerry's Viet Nam service?

It doesn't make sense.

 

FB, I think if you read the Reuters story as if Kerry said those words it comes across as almost as if Kerry was caricaturing himself in an attempt to stay on message, but it's clear from the context that is not what is happening.

 

ok sorry. I thought the off topic post which followed one of my posts was in response to it.

Yes I agree that Kerry Viet Nam alot. That's why I didn't understand you using an example when it was you and not Kerry mentioning it.

But in the game of politics you go with what works. Many say the turning point in the race for nomination came when the man who's life Kerry saved appeared with him. Based on that success Kerry pulls out his service every chance he gets.

Bush, has gotten a lot mileage from 9/11. So Bush uses that every chance he can. He brought up 9/11 when talking about the economy, when talking about Iraq, when talking about plenty of things that have nothing to do with 9/11. Is it wrong to exploit 9/11 like this?

 

Really? And here I thought he was a Democrat, running on issues important to Democrats and Americans across the political spectrum, and trying to get the opportunity to run against a man that Democrats, millions of independent voters and ever increasing numbers of Republicans think should be voted out of office.

Silly me.

 

From Josh Marshall's column in The Hill....
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Bush campaign has odd definition of ‘straight shooter’

Ladies and gentlemen, our text for the day is this quote from the president’s campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, which appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post.

“There is a big stylistic difference going forward,” said Mehlman, “between a president who is a straight shooter, who when he says something you can put it in the bank, and an opponent who has consistently shown through this campaign that he says one thing and does something else.”

If the Democrats can’t knock this one out of the park, then they’re truly hopeless.

A straight shooter?

Let’s start with the president’s signature domestic policy — the 2001 tax cut.

The president came into office rich with promises that the mammoth tax cut he ran on in the 2000 election would not cause structural deficits. On the contrary, he and his advisers repeatedly told the country, it would send money back to American families, leave some funds for small investments in domestic needs — such as a prescription drug benefit — and still allow for a balanced budget.

Needless to say, those predictions turned out to be ridiculously off the mark, as anyone with a calculator could have told you three years ago.

When the president took his oath of office in January 2001, the federal budget surplus stood at more than $200 billion. Now the deficit is pegged at just over $500 billion. In just three years under President Bush, the nation’s fiscal health has deteriorated by roughly three-quarters of a trillion dollars.

The White House has a slew of excuses, of course.

The surplus was never really that big, they say. Sept. 11 walloped the economy and required new spending on defense and homeland security. On and on and on. Each of these points has some merit. But none of them is as important as the president’s
policies in causing the current fiscal meltdown.

The verdict is simple: The president told the American people it would be X, and it turned out to be Y. And even if you buy the “unforeseen” circumstances excuse, that still doesn’t explain why the president continued (and continues) pushing more tax cuts even as it’s become clear that his policies have pushed the country’s finances almost fatally out of whack.

That’s domestic policy. Now let’s take Iraq, the signature of the president’s foreign policy.

Most foreign-policy and intelligence analysts figured Saddam Hussein still had some chemical and probably some biological weapons capacity. But the president and his advisers repeatedly told the American people that it was far, far worse.

Iraq had a robust chemical and biological weapons capacity, they said. It was actively at work on a nuclear weapons program. It was developing unmanned aerial vehicles that could attack the American mainland. It had active ties with al Qaeda and might possibly have been connected to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Again, needless to say, every one of those claims turned out to be false. A few of them seemed reasonable at the time — and were widely credited even by the president’s political opponents. But most were pretty obviously false from the get-go. And even the feeble investigations that are now afoot are demonstrating that, in most cases, the administration had good reason to know they weren’t true at the time.

Folks who follow politics for a living can dish out countless examples of promises unfulfilled or questionable claims — here, a cooked EPA study, there, a bogus claim about the amount of stem-cell lines available for research. But what I’ve noted above are the big-picture items — the topics everyone who is even remotely likely to vote this November is quite aware of. And on these points the president’s straight-shooter reputation is more than a bit frayed.

Of course, you’d expect me to say that. I was a critic of the president when his numbers topped 80 percent. But it’s not just me. Those falling poll numbers for the president have also been showing that his reputation as a truth-teller is on the skids, too.

According to the new CBS News poll out this week, 57 percent of registered voters think the president intentionally exaggerated the Iraq threat to build the case for war. An ABC News/Washington Post poll from late last week pegged that number at 54 percent. And the latter poll showed that only 52 percent believed Bush is “honest and trustworthy,” the worst rating the president has ever gotten on this key measure that has long been the lynchpin of his political strength.

The Bush campaign’s plan, as articulated by Mehlman, is clear enough: take the president’s penchant for blunt, unadorned talk and hope voters will credit him with honesty. It worked in 2000. But now there’s a record. And if the Democrats have anything close to a clue, it won’t work again.

 

Another column via The Hill taht takes apart some of Bush's recent "courageous" stances... striving for short-term political gain at the expense of the office, the country, and the world is NOT courageous. It is not principled. It is not honest.
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Political gambits have Bush singing February blues

Have you noticed it too? That sinking feeling?

Over the past month, there’s been a subtle but unmistakable shift in the public perceptions of President Bush. And not one for the better.

The evidence is in the worrisome new poll numbers and the oh-so-speedy effort to get out ahead of the calls for an Iraq inquiry. The press treatment is more sour. And a mix of unease and impatience is starting to emanate from Republican circles.

Some causes are obvious: The rush of approbation over the capture of Saddam Hussein has subsided. The economy, which looked to be on fire six weeks ago, now seems healthy but not remarkable. The WMD imbroglio is back in the headlines. And the sheer magnitude of the fiscal crisis facing the country is again on display.

But the president’s deeper problem stems from increasing doubts that his White House is — to employ an overused phrase — on the level, that every new proposal isn’t simply one more gambit for short-term political gain, regardless of the consequences.

What has helped turn the tide is a string of crass and clumsy political gambits ranging from the president’s immigration proposal to the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t plan for a trip to Mars and the new brouhaha over budgetary shenanigans with the prescription drug plan.

What did these three political plays have in common?

Not one of them was well thought-out on its own terms, and none had much to do with the president’s political agenda.

The clearest example was the plan to send men to Mars. This wasn’t a real policy proposal.

The whole thing was never even meant to happen. It was supposed to be a campaign sound bite to give a running start to the State of the Union roll-out and a bullet point for the president’s onward-and-upward-with-optimism reelection theme.

Had this been a serious proposal, it would have required a vast national effort costing, in all likelihood, hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet when it didn’t strike a chord with voters or the Sunday shows, it got tossed aside without a second thought.
It wasn’t a policy proposal. It was a political ploy.

And the White House cut it loose so unceremoniously that that unlovely reality was impossible to miss.

In isolation, that wouldn’t have been a big deal. But it fits a pattern.

Take the president’s immigration-reform proposal. It’s not that some sort of immigration reform along these lines lacks all merit.

But no one thought that this proposal was actually going to pass through this Congress. And, more to the point, it was pretty clear that the president didn’t care.

That wasn’t the point. The aim wasn’t to pass a bill but to peel some of the Hispanic vote away from the Democrats. The whole point of the proposal was simply announcing the proposal — a fact that become painfully evident as analysts began working over the plan and seeing just how sloppily it had been thrown together.

For the past three years, Washington has tended to look at these political gambits from the White House and judge them on the basis of their political acumen rather than their substance or likely real-world repercussions.

So, for instance, with the immigration proposal, few thought much of it as policy. But almost everyone agreed that the president’s crack political operation had managed to stick it to the Democrats in fine fashion.

When it passed late last year, the prescription drug benefit bill was viewed in the same way.

Since the politics were brilliant, most Republicans and pundits set aside their suspicions that it was questionable in policy terms and blew an even bigger whole in the country’s long-term fiscal outlook.

That’s why the news that the cost is even higher than advertised — and that the White House probably knew it all along — is packing a bigger punch than is usual for revelations about budgeting shenanigans.

It’s brought all those latent suspicions to the surface.

Suddenly these serial political gambits look less like so many examples of canny politics than sign after sign that everything this administration does is political to the core. Besides tax cuts and parceling out pork to favored constituencies, there’s very little this White House does in domestic policy that isn’t for short-term political gain, regardless of the consequences.

A lot of this has been clear for some time. But, of late, the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. have been making it just a little too obvious.

And now those folks are starting to pay a price.

 

Excerpts from David Corn's column in The Nation...
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Kerry arrived in the Senate in 1985. This Vietnam War hero turned antiwar leader had been lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. But he entered the body more as the prosecutor he had been in the late 1970s after graduating from Boston College law school. In early 1986 Kerry's office was contacted by a Vietnam vet who alleged that the support network for the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras (who were fighting against the socialist Sandinistas in power) was linked to drug traffickers. Kerry doubted that the Reagan Administration, obsessed with supporting the contras, would investigate such charges. He pushed for a Senate inquiry and a year later, as chairman of a Foreign Relations subcommittee, obtained approval to conduct a probe.

It was not an easy ride. Reagan Justice Department officials sought to discredit and stymie his investigation. Republicans dismissed it. One anti-Kerry effort used falsified affidavits to make it seem his staff had bribed witnesses. The Democratic staff of the Senate Iran/contra committee--which showed little interest in the contra drug connection--often refused to cooperate. "They were fighting us tooth and nail," recalls Jack Blum, one of Kerry's investigators. "We had the White House and the CIA against us on one side and our colleagues in the Senate on the other. But Kerry told us, 'Keep going.' He didn't let this stuff faze him."

Kerry's inquiry widened to look at Cuba, Haiti, the Bahamas, Honduras and Panama. In 1989 he released a report that slammed the Reagan Administration for neglecting or undermining anti-drug efforts in order to pursue other foreign policy objectives. It noted that the government in the 1970s and '80s had "turned a blind eye" to the corruption and drug dealing of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who had done various favors for Washington (including assisting the contras). The report concluded that "individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking...and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers." And, it added, US government agencies--meaning the CIA and the State Department--had known this.

This was a rather explosive finding, but the Kerry report did not provoke much uproar in the media, and the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill did little to support Kerry and keep the matter alive. His critics derided him as a conspiracy buff. Yet a decade later the CIA inspector general released a pair of reports that acknowledged that the agency had worked with suspected drug smugglers to support the contras. Kerry had been right.

fter the contra investigation, Kerry next turned to a far more sensitive target: a bank connected to a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser. During their investigation of Noriega, Kerry's staff discovered that the Bank of Credit and Commerce International had facilitated Noriega's drug trafficking and money laundering. This led to an inquiry into BCCI, a worldwide but murky institution more or less controlled by the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. BCCI was a massive criminal enterprise, although this was not yet publicly known. It had engaged in rampant fraud and money laundering (to help out, among others, drug dealers, terrorists and arms traffickers) around the world. Its tentacles ran everywhere. Its political connections reached around the globe. Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger both became involved in the scandal. When banking regulators finally shut down BCCI in 1991, an estimated 250,000 creditors and depositors from forty countries were out billions of dollars.

One key issue was whether BCCI had secretly and illegally acquired control of First American bank in Washington, DC. The top officials of First American were Clark Clifford, a longtime Democratic graybeard and a party fundraiser, and Robert Altman, his protégé. Democratic senators grumbled about Kerry's crusade, which put Clifford in the cross-hairs. "This really pissed people off," Blum says. BCCI hired from both Democratic and Republican quarters an army of lawyers, PR specialists and lobbyists (including former members of Congress) to thwart the investigation. The Justice Department of the first Bush Administration did not respond to information on BCCI uncovered by Kerry's staff. So Blum took the material to New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who then commenced an investigation of BCCI that led to indictments. And Kerry again found himself tussling with the CIA, for the agency had been using the services of BCCI even after it had learned that the bank was crooked and in league with terrorists (including Abu Nidal).

In the fall of 1992 Kerry released a report on the BCCI affair. It blasted everyone: Justice, Treasury, US Customs, the Federal Reserve, Clifford and Altman (for participating in "some of BCCI's deceptions"), high-level lobbyists and fixers, and the CIA. The report noted that after the CIA knew the bank was "a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American...for CIA operations." The report was, in a sense, an indictment of Washington cronyism. In the years since, there's been nothing like it. Senator Hank Brown, the ranking Republican on Kerry's subcommittee, noted, "John Kerry was willing to spearhead this difficult investigation. Because many important members of his own party were involved in this scandal, it was a distasteful subject for other committee and subcommittee chairmen to investigate. They did not. John Kerry did."

While Kerry was in the middle of the BCCI muck, Senate majority leader George Mitchell asked him to assume another difficult task: investigate the unaccounted-for Vietnam POWs and MIAs. For years so-called POW advocates, like billionaire Ross Perot, had claimed American GIs were still being held in Vietnam, and the highly charged POW/MIA issue was the main roadblock to normalizing relations. Working closely with Senator John McCain, a Republican who had been a POW, Kerry got the Pentagon to declassify 1 million pages of records. His committee chased after rumors of American soldiers being held. He took fourteen trips to Vietnam. This was a hard mission: How could his committee say there were absolutely no POWs still captive in Vietnam? Yet anything less could keep the POW controversy alive.

On one trip to Hanoi, as Douglas Brinkley notes in Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, Kerry insisted that he be allowed to inspect the catacombs beneath Ho Chi Minh's tomb, where, according to a persistent rumor, the remaining POWs were being held. Permission was granted, and with conservative Republican Bob Smith by his side, he inspected the tunnels and found no signs of POWs. In January 1993 Kerry's POW/MIA committee released a 1,223-page report concluding that there was "no compelling evidence that proves any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia." Some POW die-hards howled. (Journalist Sydney Schanberg has accused Kerry of covering up and destroying evidence that POWs were left behind.) But the report mostly settled the issue. President Bill Clinton was able to drop the Vietnam trade embargo and normalize relations.

...

 

Republicans are really worried to have war hero that's a democrat running against somebody who's lived the good life and hasn't had to succeed at running any successful business adventures, and didn't go to war.

Kerry's Viet Nam service isn't about issues at all, but thankfully Kerry has provided his position on issues too. If I were Kerry I would keep playing up Viet Nam, it certainly has scared the other side.

 

What is your point here, basso? If someone asked me that question, I'd answer "yes" and could easily spend an hour talking about a dog I had who was a big part of my life for 12 years and was a great friend of several of my friends. Never had a dog like that? Too bad. It's a great experience I wouldn't have missed for anything.

Did you happen to ponder what it would be like to have a "mascot" blown from the deck of your boat to the deck of another during a patrol? You don't think it's something you might remember? Golly, Kerry sounds like an actual human being. I guess our President isn't supposed to be anything like that, as far as you're concerned?

Again, basso... what's your point? Somehow this story is supposed to be a negative??