What Party?
Kerry And Vietnam:
The nominee is no innocent victim of partisan attacks. He's just being repaid for his own words ¡Ö words he can't bring himself to disown.
Bob Dole, plain-spoken as always, has gone right to the heart of John F. Kerry's Vietnam problem. It's not the Democrat's disputed war record that's hurting him most. It's his antiwar record, about which there is no dispute.
Kerry, who may or may not have been somewhere around Cambodia on Christmas Eve in 1968, was indisputably in Washington, D.C. in April 1971, where he riveted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with testimony about "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
This and other appearances put Kerry on the map as a new star on the antiwar left. It also seared his name and image into the minds of those who were still fighting in Vietnam. These men understood their foe far better than Kerry, who saw the fight against communism as based on outdated "Cold War precepts."
They knew, too, that his rhetoric would embolden the enemy and further demoralize American troops.
Looking back on that, Dole noted to CNN over the weekend that Kerry was trying to have it both ways.
"One day, he's saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day, he's standing there, 'I want to be president because I'm a Vietnam veteran.' "
Dole added: "Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served."
But something keeps Kerry from following such wise advice. Either through arrogance or ignorance, he seems not to understand that his words and deeds as a young man hurt his fellow Americans, and that some payback is to be expected.
Kerry's party has tried to bury the 1971 Kerry, the young man who was so wrong about communism and wrong about his countrymen. As soon as he won the Iowa caucuses in January, Democrats dredged up old questions about President Bush's National Guard duty. (Remember Michael Moore calling Bush a deserter?) When that story faded, the party went all out to focus public attention on Kerry's four-month tour in Vietnam.
Now that key details of his service have been questioned by credible people, the Democrats have resumed sniping at Bush.
"Senator Kerry carries shrapnel in his thigh," former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta said Sunday, "as distinct from President Bush, who carries two fillings in his teeth from his service in the Alabama National Guard, which seem to be his only time that he showed up."
Meanwhile, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is airing a new ad featuring Kerry's 1971 testimony. Does such 33-year-old news matter? It does, as long as Kerry fails to show Americans how much, if at all, he has learned and grown since then. |
