Counterpunch slams Kerry [View All]

[cryofan]

Ya'll gonna love dis:
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Dean made his own mistakes and spent much of his $40 million foolishly on lousy campaign ads but it’s clear that in Iowa and New Hampshire he was up against the Democratic Party machine and lacked the experienced operators who might have saved the day. It was the party machine that pulled it out for Kerry, and once Kerry had got those two crucial victories, the overwhelming eagerness of Democratic voters to annoint an uncontested champion to go up against Bush carried him forward.


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Kerry reminds us of no one such as Mr Facing-Both-Ways, in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Unlike Bush, who sensibly took a vacation from the perils of conflict in the National Guard, Kerry enlisted for combat in Vietnam and shuttled up and down the Mekong river commanding a Swift Boat, deployed for the sort of counter-insurgency missions that had Kerry’s former senatorial colleague, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, slitting the throats of Vietnamese villagers.

Kerry returned to the US, thrust himself forward as a leader of the antiwar movement, but made a point of distancing himself from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Like Clinton trying to figure out how to dodge the draft respectably, Kerry was zealous to preserve his political viability within the system. “The agenda of some of the folks within the veterans’ movement ultimately became confused and went way beyond trying to end the war,” Kerry later told the Boston Phoenix. “There was a lot of rhetoric about every social ill and evil there was.” The media got the point. Morley Safer of CBS applauded Kerry as “a veteran whose articulate call to reason rather than anarchy seemed to bridge the gap between Abbie Hoffman and Mr Agnew’s so-called Silent Majority.” From Abbie to Agnew, now there’s a leap!

Distaste for anarchy notwithstanding, when the VVAW forced a senate hearing on the war, Kerry pushed himself to the front to deliver the high-profile testimony before the tv cameras and, later, at a Vets’ demonstration at the White House similarly took advantage of the heavily covered event to join other vets in throwing war medals over the White House fence. The ones tossed by Kerry actually belonged to someone else, thus permitting the prudent Kerry to preserve his own for later proud display in his various offices and for their ultimate deployment as blazing reproaches to Bush.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn02112004.html