This is the real article on Kerry you didn't post:
It is SUPPORTIVE of Kerry and this heritage nonsense.
Scott Lehigh, Boston Globe:
As stories go, the Case of the Half-Hinted but Hollow Hibernian Heritage fell well short of being damning. (This means I don't think the story is a big deal.) Some 1982 campaign T-shirts that appropriated a slogan from an
Irish political campaign, plus two slender, and plausibly explained, statements in a career that spans three decades do not an Irish political masquerade make. (This means I don't think Kerry can rightly be accused of trying to pass himself off as Irish. And that I find the evidence the story
produced pretty thin.)
Nor do I think Kerry can be properly taken to task, as some commentators have done, for failing to correct reporters when they have erroneously described him as Irish.(This means it's not Kerry's fault that reporters have, at one time or another, incorrectly called him Irish.) That's a sin
of omission, not commission: He's being accused not of gilding the shamrock but of not working actively to degild it. (This is a way of restating the point that it's not Kerry's responsibility to correct every erroneous
report about him.)
Perhaps that's an example of Kerry playing things a tad too cute. But it's hardly a window into a major character flaw. (This means the whole flapdoodle shouldn't be seen as a Kerry character flaw.) Nor was it as though Kerry's roots were a complete mystery. Certainly his correct, non-Irish pedigree has been mentioned locally over the years, though
usually in, ahem, other publications.
* Dont change articles 180 dehgress again, thank you. |
