Not just a ketchup slurping gigolo, but a hypocritical sleazeball as well. From your link:
...the appearance that the senator had played a cynical cash-for-favors game forced him to play damage control. In January 1998 he told the Boston Herald that the timing of the SEC meeting and the subsequent fund-raiser was "totally coincidental" and "entirely staff driven." He said the Beverly Hills event had been set up by a professional fund-raiser, and that he had never even met Chung until the night of the event. But congressional documents obtained by NEWSWEEK seem to tell a different story. "Dear Johnny, It was a great pleasure to have met you last week," Kerry told Chung in a handwritten note dated July 31, 1996. "Barbara [a Kerry fund-raiser] told me of your willingness to help me with my campaign... It means a lot to have someone like you on my team as I face the toughest race of my career." That same day the Kerry fund-raiser faxed a memo to Chung that read, in part: "The following are two ways in which you can be helpful to John." No. 1 was "Host an event in L.A. on Saturday, Sept. 9th."...
...On the campaign trail, Kerry routinely attacks the president for his ties to big-dollar donors...
...Over the years, reports the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, Kerry has raised more than $30 million for his Senate campaigns. A good portion has come from industries with an interest in the committees on which Kerry has a seat—including more than $3 million from financial firms (Kerry serves on the Senate Finance Committee)...
...the senator in 2001 formed a fund-raising group called the Citizen Soldier Fund, which brought in more than $1.2 million in unregulated "soft money." Kerry pledged he would limit individual donations to $10,000. But in late 2002, just before new federal laws banning soft money took effect, Kerry quietly lifted the ceiling and took all the cash he could get. In the month before the election, the fund raised nearly $879,000—including $27,500 from wireless telecom firms such as T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon. That same month, Kerry cosponsored a bill to overturn a judge's ruling and permit the wireless firms to bid on billions of dollars' worth of wireless airwaves... |
