Posted on 07/29/2004 11:48:03 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Thirty-five years ago last week – on July 22, 1969 – I was a little younger than 29-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, the congressional aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy. They left a boozy party together sometime after 11 that night and she drowned when the car he was driving veered off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island (near Martha’s Vineyard) into the water.
According to journalist Jeff Jacoby, who has faithfully followed this case for over three decades, the senator managed to swim to shore and make his way to a motel in Edgartown, Mass., where he had the presence of mind to phone one of his aides.
Shortly after the call, he also had the presence of mind to return to the party he and Mary Jo had attended to seek out two of his lawyer friends and then, according to Jacoby (and court records), returned again to the motel, made more than 16 long-distance phone calls to other aides and advisers, went to sleep, chatted with a friend the next morning, ordered two newspapers, met again with his lawyer friends and called yet another lawyer.
All this – 10 hours of activity! – before the senator of “people in need” or any of his “humanitarian” helpers called the police!
When questioned about the dozens of inconsistencies in his story, Kennedy claimed he was “in shock.” And the liberal media – yes, the bleeding hearts were gushing even then – spun his sham story the way his handlers wanted them to, by making believe that the man was not a perfect candidate to be convicted on charges of gross negligence and vehicular homicide.
According to Jacoby, the diver who recovered Mary Jo’s body – who was mysteriously barred from the inquest about the case – said she had not died quickly but had lost her young and promising life “after breathing a pocket of trapped air, finally suffocating to death when the oxygen ran out.”
Jacoby said that Kennedy “pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and was sentenced to two months, suspended.”
This is where Kennedy's crime gets personal with me.
I pictured Mary Jo in her deathtrap. I breathed every breath for her, hoping and praying, as I know she hoped and prayed, that “someone” would come to rescue her. My experience was not of a newspaper reader or a television viewer but of a living woman who vicariously died every second of Mary Jo’s gasping-for-air, agonizing, horrifying death.
Every time – hundreds of times – I have seen Senator Kennedy since then, whether coping with his personal demons, proposing legislation or even railing with apoplectic rage against President Bush, I think of only one thing: his criminal negligence in doing everything to save himself and nothing to save Mary Jo Kopechne.
To me, this is his “legacy.”
I remember President Clinton wagging his finger at the American public, telling them, “I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky.” Frankly, I didn’t care if he had had sex with her (which, as it turned out, he had) or a million other women.
What I cared about were the endless months it took for his phony protestations of innocence to be revealed as an endless litany of lies. Time in which this symbol of 1990s narcissism continued to deceive the public – until that pesky DNA evidence on his paramour’s infamous blue dress revealed him to be a bald-faced liar.
Finally, in his exquisitely staged and carefully parsed apologia, the president who was impeached for the crime of perjury and also disbarred said that he had let down his wife and daughter, the Congress and the American people. And, of course, he blamed his opponents (as all narcissists do) for his sorry end.
This is where Clinton’s crimes, lies and sin get personal with me.
I don’t care what preening peacocks do on their time, but on my time – as a citizen of the United States – I care very much that Clinton squandered his time dodging his self-created scandals while terrorists throughout the ’90s bombed the World Trade Center, U.S. embassies in Africa, the American military barracks in Saudi Arabia, the USS Cole in Yemen – the list of attacks on our country goes on and on – while he did nothing!
Clinton’s negligence in doing everything to save himself and nothing to address the grave and gathering threat that resulted in September 11th is unforgivable.
To me, this is his “legacy.”
Just last week, Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel “Sandy” Berger, admitted that in reviewing highly classified documents from the National Archives before he testified in front of the 9/11 Commission, “I inadvertently took a few documents. … I immediately returned everything I had except for a few documents that I apparently had accidentally discarded." And, it turned out, destroyed!
Berger – who until last week was John Kerry’s “adviser” on counterterrorism – knew better than most people on earth that removing any documents from the Archives was strictly forbidden and considered the most serious breach of national security.
Apparently, Berger asked the Archives’ monitors to leave the room so he could make private cell phone calls and then secreted the documents in his jacket, pants and socks.
It gets worse. The missing documents were the most-classified “after action” reports about the Millennium plot, a terrorist plan to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 1999. The reports included measures the Clinton administration might have and should have taken – but didn’t – against al-Qaida in Afghanistan and in the U.S., where they knew cells were operating with absolute impunity.
Why? Because of their deep leftist belief that violating the “civil rights” of known terrorists was worse than risking an attack on Americans both here and abroad.
It gets even worse. Now we learn that the Clinton administration – meaning both Clinton and Berger – failed to disclose the Millennium plot information to the incoming Bush administration!!!
In typical Clintonesque style, Berger – and his former boss and leftist apologists in the media – described his egregious actions as “an honest mistake,” simply the result of "sloppiness.”
Did Berger do this at the behest of Clinton, the better to expunge the former president’s utter failure to deal effectively and decisively with America’s sworn enemies? Did he do it to secure for himself a high position in a potential Kerry administration? Did he do it to deflect attention away from the fact that between 1998 and 2000 he – with Clinton’s blessing – blocked no fewer than four plans to take out al-Qaida? Or did he do it to insure that the 9/11 Commission’s report would damn the Bush administration?
To me, motives are of secondary and only academic interest. Behavior – what a person actually does – is the yardstick by which he or she is ultimately measured.
This is where Berger’s behavior gets personal with me.
Like all people on September 11, the phrase “There but for the grace of God go I” took on new meaning. We weren’t watching another one-minute TV report about a calamity in some remote part of the world. This was our world! Those were our firefighters, our policemen, our emergency workers, our neighbors – and our funerals!
And while years of attacks against us had taken place before then, it was Berger, the self-described “sloppy” guy, who was personally engaged in establishing roadblocks to deal with the clear and present danger al-Qaida agents presented to our citizens.
While Berger has not yet been charged with a crime, his negligence in doing everything to advance himself, cover for his former boss and attempt through subterfuge to deceive the nation, and doing nothing in his formidable power to alert the nation and possibly save my fellow citizens and me from September 11th can only be described as reprehensible.
To me, this is his “legacy.”
But Kennedy, Clinton and Berger are not running for president; their ideological soul mate, John Kerry, is. It is Kerry who desperately wants Americans to believe that he will “protect” America more effectively than his opponent has, although throughout his campaign he has insisted that, "The global terror threat has been exaggerated by the Bush administration."
This is no surprise coming from a man whose thinking is identical to Kennedy’s, Clinton’s and Berger’s when it comes to issues of national security and who, during his nearly two-decade tenure in the Senate, has voted consistently and unfailingly against military and intelligence spending, including the $87 million to support our troops in Iraq.
Kerry voted for the war in Iraq but failed to fund it, saying that he was only in favor of “threatening” to use force in Iraq, when the resolution clearly stated that “The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate.” No mention of “threatening” at all.
This is vintage Kerry, which is why the term flip-flopper has stuck to him like Crazy glue. He has said he believes in strong defense but voted to cut a billion dollars for counterterrorism after the first World Trade Center bombing and to cut $1.5 billion from intelligence funding the following year.
He voted three times to exempt terrorists from the death penalty but then changed his mind. He voted for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill but then changed his mind, setting up a soft-money PAC from which he has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporations, unions, etc.
He said he was against same-sex “marriages” but voted against the Defense of Marriage Act. He voted for the No Child Left Behind Act but changed his mind. He voted for the 2001 Patriot Act but changed his mind.
He voted against Desert Storm in 1991 but changed his mind, writing to a constituent that he "supported” it. But then he turned around and voted to slash over $3 billion from the defense budget.
In 1992, he voted to cut $6 billion from defense. In 1993, he voted against increased defense spending for military pay raises, and the same year he introduced a plan to cut the number of Navy submarines and crews, reduce the number of light infantry units in the Army and tactical fighter wings in the Air Force, terminate the Navy’s coastal mine-hunting ship program, and force the retirement of no fewer than 60,000 members of the armed forces in one year.
And every year since then, Kerry has voted against every intelligence, military and defense budget, including for the weapons that our servicemen and servicewomen are using throughout the world today, among them B-2 stealth bombers, F-16 Fighting Falcons, M1 Abrams tanks, Apache helicopters, Tomahawk cruise missiles, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and the Aegis anti-aircraft system – the list goes on and on and on. And he was one of only 12 senators (out of 87) to vote against funding for the protective Kevlar vests worn by our troops.
But Kerry voted to increase U.S. funding for U.N operations by 800 percent!
All this is not surprising, coming from a man who is rated, according to his irrefutable voting record, as the No. 1 liberal in the U.S. Senate. Not No. 2 or No. 3 or No. 4 – as his running mate, freshman senator Sen. John Edwards, is – but No. 1!
That is what liberals like Kerry do! They vote against protecting our country, they lobby for ceding our security to corrupt bodies like the U.N. and they positively swoon over the thought of high taxes (which is why Kerry voted for the biggest tax increase in American history under President Clinton).
But Kerry has done much worse. According to journalist Kenneth R. Timmerman in Insight magazine, Kerry promised the Council on Foreign Relations in December to “spend the first 100 days of his administration traveling the world to denounce his predecessor, apologize for his `radically wrong’ policy, and seek ‘cooperation and compromise’ with friend and foe alike.”
Including Iran, which tops the State Department's list of supporters of international terrorism!
Subsequently, Timmerman says, “the senator's advisers enlisted overseas Democrats to launch a letter-writing and op-ed campaign denouncing the Bush foreign-policy record … which succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Kerry's handlers. …”
Then the Kerry camp sent an e-mail to the Mehr news agency in Tehran, which published the message in blaring headlines, as did the hard-line, anti-American Tehran Times. The e-mail’s entire seven-paragraph text was interpreted, Timmerman says, as “Kerry's support for the murderous regime” – a regime responsible for 25 years of terror and “Iran's overt support and harboring of top al-Qaeda operatives.”
Kerry’s e-mail has since spread like wildfire throughout the Middle East, where members of al-Qaida, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Liberation Front, among other terrorist groups, are rejoicing at his message to “repair the damage done by the incumbent president.”
“The hardcore America-hating, Israel-hating, jihad-spouting Muslim clerics in the Mideast are very excited and passing [the e-mail] around,” writes Don Bendell, former Vietnam Green Beret captain and best-selling author.
No wonder Kerry announced that he has “the support of foreign leaders”! No wonder he is receiving massive campaign contributions from Iranian businessmen who are lobbying to have the U.S. lift its sanctions on Iran.
And no wonder the chairman of the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran wrote to Kerry saying that the e-mail “sends a message that America is willing to make a deal despite the blood of Americans who were murdered … and are being killed today in Iraq … you have encouraged and emboldened a tyrannical regime to use this as propaganda and declare 'open season' on the freedom fighters in Iran."
“Oh how bin Laden must be smiling at this moment,” writes pundit Barbara J. Stock. (www.republicanandproud.com).
Never heard about this e-mail? Thank the left-wing media!
My own revulsion at Kerry is not only for his shameful voting record and shameless outreach to America’s enemies. As soon as he came on the political scene in the late '60s as the poster boy of the Vietnam War protest movement, I knew I was looking at a man who would go to any lengths to stay in the spotlight, no matter how vulgar his performance.
As we all know, he supported and fought in the Vietnam War for four months but when he came home to streets full of protestors, the ever-opportunistic political aspirant changed his mind, denouncing the war and joining its harshest critics in condemning the entire U.S. as “criminal” as well as saying that he and his fellow soldiers had committed “war crimes.”
According to Bendell, Kerry was “the primary reason that the American public grabbed sturdy unbending brooms of judgment and swept [Vietnam veterans] into the closet of silence and shame for so many years.” Now, he says, Kerry is “getting ready for our society to grab those same stiff brooms and sweep our brave, noble young men and women fighting against the War on Terror in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere into that cold, dark cell of heartbreak and betrayal … and put our troops back under the powder-blue flag of the United Nations.”
This is where Kerry’s self-admitted crimes get personal with me.
I knew some of the Vietnam vets he hurled his vicious, lying accusations at, and I knew their families. And I am very familiar with the work of the SwiftVets who served with Kerry and have documented his voluminous lies (www.swiftvets.com). Slander is among the worst sins of humankind – and, to my mind, Kerry is guilty as charged!
Kerry has done everything to promote himself and nothing over his entire tenure in the Senate to protect America and its citizens from danger or the 3,000 deaths that occurred on September 11, 2001.
To me, this is his “legacy” – a legacy he is sure to enlarge upon with the help of Kennedy, Clinton, Berger and other leftists – if Americans are misguided enough to vote for him on November 2.
Joan Swirsky is a New-York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com.
Has the text of this Kerry inspired e-mail to the mullahs ever been posted on FR?
I haven't seen the full text. All I've seen are references to it.
That he did so demonstrates a lack of common sense as well as a lack of oversight of his staff.
WASHINGTON (Mehr News Agency) -- The office of Senator John Kerry, the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primary in the U.S., sent the Mehr News Agency an e-email saying that Kerry will try to repair the damage done by the incumbent president if he wins the election. The text of the e-mail follows.
As Americans who have lived and worked extensively overseas, we have personally witnessed the high regard with which people around the world have historically viewed the United States. Sadly, we are also painfully aware of how the actions and the attitudes demonstrated by the U.S. government over the past three years have threatened the goodwill earned by presidents of both parties over many decades and put many of our international relationships at risk.
It is in the urgent interests of the people of the United States to restore our country's credibility in the eyes of the world. America needs the kind of leadership that will repair alliances with countries on every continent that have been so damaged in the past few years, as well as build new friendships and overcome tensions with others.
We are convinced that John Kerry is the candidate best qualified to meet this challenge. Senator Kerry has the diplomatic skill and temperament as well as a lifetime of accomplishments in field of international affairs. He believes that collaboration with other countries is crucial to efforts to win the war on terror and make America safer.
An understanding of global affairs is essential in these times, and central to this campaign Kerry has the experience and the understanding necessary to successfully restore the United States to its position of respect within the community of nations. He has the judgment and vision necessary to assure that the United States fulfills a leadership role in meeting the challenges we face throughout the world.
The current Administration's policies of unilateralism and rejection of important international initiatives, from the Kyoto Accords to the Biological Weapons Convention, have alienated much of the world and squandered remarkable reserves of support after 9/11. This climate of hostility affects us all, but most especially impacts those who reside overseas. Disappointment with current U.S. leadership is widespread, extending not just to the corridors of power and politics, but to the man and woman on the street as well.
We believe John Kerry is the Democrat who can go toe-to-toe against the current Administration on national security and defense issues. We also remain convinced that John Kerry has the best chance of beating the incumbent in November, and putting America on a new course that will lead to a safer, more secure, and more stable world.
Is this man fit to lead our country? I think not.
Please excuse my bad typing: "should", not "shuld"; "particular" not "perticular"....
I'll thank Dan Rather later today.
Aid and comfort to the enemy, pure and simple.
Way to go, Bill, thanks. Scorch his ears!
bump -GREAT ARTICLE
Hoooooly buckets...Mandatory USA Today Full Page Ad. Every day till the re-election.
Good read!
This is the kind of thread that FReepers need to email to their fence-sitting friends - Today!
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