Sh'ite terrorists. The graffiti states in Arabic 'No more Bush'.
Posted on 08/07/2004 7:54:53 PM PDT by pookie18
Is it a mistake for opponents of John. F. Kerry to question his Viet Nam service? Dick Morris thinks it is, on the ground that you don't attack the opposition's strength. Others, like Senator John McCain, Bill O'Reilly and much of the establishment media, think it is slimy and self-discrediting to attack a medal-winning veteran. Even Presidential Press Secretary Scott McClellan publicly lamented the activities of all independent expenditure "527 groups," the vast bulk of which, funded by the likes of George Soros, back Kerry.
Maybe.
But most of the American public is still trying to grasp the essence of the man, John F. Kerry. Despite a long career in the Senate and the week-long Boston convention infomercial, vast numbers of folks lack a settled gut-feel apprehension of the man who seeks to lead us in perilous times, and whose televised presence will enter our households on a regular basis, should he win.
When getting to know somebody new who could influence our fate, most of us construct a kind of jigsaw puzzle, observing his behavior in different situations, learning about the person's past, meeting close friends and relatives, and picking up all the little signs of character, from facial expression and posture to sense of humor.
With less than 3 months until Election Day, enough pieces of the Kerry jigsaw puzzle are on the table to provide a frame for the picture, the essential step in ordering all the other fragments. Kerry's self-chosen frame is Viet Nam. There are two potential arrangements of the straight-edged pieces. One sort of looks like a hero. The other way looks like a phony.
As any puzzle-solver knows, you have to test the two possible frame configurations with the curvy-edged pieces. Take a good look at them. Pay special attention to those clusters of a few curvy pieces that already fit together, and see if you can integrate them into one of the frames.
Cluster #1: family background Kerry grew up in a comparatively poor branch of his mother's family, descended from the ultra-rich Boston Brahmin Forbes clan. His father's side, it turns out, is of Austrian Jewish heritage, originally named Kohn. Kerry claims that he never knew or even suspected his Jewish roots until adulthood.
He grew up all over, and never really put down roots in any single place. His father was a diplomat, an occupation Kerry publicly described as a "public employee." A rich Great Aunt paid for boarding school in Switzerland, and later at St. Paul's, one of the most prestigious prep schools in New England. Nobody who knew him in his childhood has stepped forward to endorse him, and it has been reported that he had virtually no friends at St. Paul's.
For many years, Kerry was content to sit silently when others in the Boston political and media world identified him as Irish. He attended St. Patrick's Day events in South Boston regularly, further enhancing the false impression of his ethnic roots.
Cluster #2: religion Kerry is a practicing Catholic, although disagreeing with his Church's teaching on abortion. He is divorced one time, and remarried to a Catholic woman. Kerry has boasted of "not wearing his religion on his sleeve," and has received notice that certain Catholic Bishops will not allow him top take communion in their dioceses.
Cluster #3: his spouse His two wives have one overriding attribute in common: vast inherited wealth. In the universe of eligible women facing him during his two periods of bachelorhood, numbering in the tens of millions, he chose his two wives from among a group of a hundred or so single heiresses worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Wife number one has withdrawn from public view, and is unavailable for comment. Wife number two seems to love the spotlight, and enjoys telling the pubic what she thinks. She also repeatedly withdraws or recoils in public from physical gestures of affection from her husband, and refers to herself using her dead husband's name, adopting Kerry only as her "political name."
Cluster #4: his home Five of them, now that his Italian villa was sold in a private transaction with a Hollywood figure just prior to election. Beacon Hill in Boston, Georgetown, Pennsylvania (his wife's first husband's estate), Nantucket, and Idaho. And a top-of-the-line Gulfstream V private jet, The Flying Squirrel, to commute among them.
Cluster #5: military service Now hugely controversial. Applied for a draft deferment in order to study in Paris. When it was denied, he enlisted in the Navy, serving on the USS Gridley, offshore. He volunteered for service as a commander of a swift boat at a time when they were not involved in combat operations, a status which later changed, thrusting him into unanticipated danger. Here's what the Boston Globe found:
"I didn't really want to get involved in the war," Kerry said in a little-noticed contribution to a book of Vietnam reminiscences published in 1986. "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to be doing."
After receiving three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star, Kerry applied for and was allowed early exit from the combat theater, serving as an aide to an admiral. He then applied for and received an early release from his full service obligation to the Navy.
Cluster#6: professional career Became an anti-war protestor, rapidly gaining leadership in Viet Nam Veterans Against the War. Photographed throwing away military decorations, over a fence at the Capitol, although he now claims they were "borrowed" from someone else, not his, which he today displays in his Senate office.
Ran for Congress after establishing a residence in a targeted district. Defeated. Went to work as a public prosecutor, and ran for Lieutenant Governor, winning, and serving with Michael Dukakis, who was not invited to speak at the Boston Convention, despite having been a former nominee of the Democratic Party meeting in his home town.
Interestingly enough, Kerry just this week in Davenport, Iowa spoke of his career as a small businessman. He and a friend started a cookie store in Boston's Faneuil Hall Market. But this, too, is controversial. The founder of the David's Cookies chain claims that Kerry stole the plans for the store from him:
"Some guy who called me up was John Kerry, in '79 or '80," Liederman recalled. "He said he wanted to come down and talk to me about franchising. He came to the office and said he had an incredible space in Boston, which was Faneuil Hall. He said he needed some plans and some layouts and all sorts of things to get the approval of the landlord."
"So I gave him the layout, the package, and he went back and I didn't hear from him for six or seven months."
Then one day Liederman got a call from someone who said they'd seen one of his stores in Faneuil Hall. Not having a store in Boston, Liederman decided to have a look for himself.
"It was a direct, 100-percent knock off of David's Cookies," said Liederman, from the appliances to the shop's design to the cookies themselves. "If you had walked into a David's Cookie's store in Manhattan at the same time he opened 'John's Cookies' in Boston, you couldn't tell the difference."
The coming months will provide enough new pieces and clusters to determine for a large majority of the undecided which framework fits best: hero or phony. As the facts are reported, the American people will decide.
Some thoughts on that critical subject are below.
Congressman Billybob
Latest column, "Says the Wuss: Ma, He's Touching Me"
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"The coming months will provide enough new pieces and clusters to determine for a large majority of the undecided which framework fits best: hero or phony."
What about...
...excremental, pestilental, purulent, festering, anaerobic, diseased, poisonous, gangrenous, necrotic piece of sh*t?
I really like the jigsaw angle. I guess lots of people do it unconsciously. Put the pieces together. Connect the dots. And what do ya got?
"The coming months will provide enough new pieces and clusters to determine for a large majority of the undecided which framework fits best: hero or phony."
What about...
...excremental, pestilental, purulent, festering, anaerobic, diseased, poisonous, gangrenous, necrotic piece of sh*t?
Thius article does a great job of laying it all out.
People forget that the most successful politicians are the ones the public can get a read on and grasp, and who have (or can fake) a basic decency and love of America--what America IS not, as in Hillary's case, what it MIGHT be.
(All partisanship aside, I do think HRC loves America, because she thinks it's ripe for transformation into a socialist dreamstate--she thinks it's OK now but its ready to be transformed. I don't think she is up to doing that, but she'll give it a try.)
This guy gets John Kerry's story right, and anyone looking to vote for Kerry will find that story wanting.
How come the guy from David's cookies never sued? How come this is the first I've ever heard of this story?
And what's most frustrating, about the Kerry puzzle, is finding out, after hours of diligent work, that 7 of the pieces are missing.
Rush Limbaugh himself had nice things to say about the leader of the Democrat Leadership Council, Bill Clinton. There had been a DLC conference in Cleveland and Rush was impressed with these conservative Democrats especially their leader the Gov. of Arkansas.
I had no reason to think ill of Bill Clinton the instant a video of him appeared on TV.
Flim flam man.
I no longer have a TV and have to rely on long ago memories of Kerry's TV image.
Phony.
The story has been around on FR for about six months.
The denouement, I think, is that Liederman bought out the store and put his brand on it. Both sides won, because Kerry saved himself from losing an infringement suit, while Liederman inherited the "sweetheart lease" that had been granted Kerry.
I agree, steplock. Viet Nam is the exact opposite of Kerry's greatest strength. It is his greatest weakness. The more information that comes out, the more obvious it is that there is no better situation to indicate his disqualification as Commander in Chief.
So then why would they make it their #1 selling point? Simple...purely, 100% tactical. In reality, military competence, the most important criteria for president in the post-9/11 world, is demonstrably best exhibited by George Bush. As Commander in Chief, he presided over one of the most effective military actions in American history, the sequential elimination of the Taliban and Hussein. Kerry's greatest military achievement? The successful neutralization of a sampan full of rice. And it goes downhill from there. To the point where his superiors actually had to BEG him to leave.
Trying to remake Kerry’s military image, if successful, would simultaneously neutralize Bush’s greatest strength and remediate Kerry’s greatest weakness. Not unlike a plastic surgeon taking Bush’s relatively youthful, energetic face and transplanting it onto Kerry’s wrinkled, haggard old Botox bucket. Good trick if you can pull it off.
And Kerry’s team knows it can. Why? Because the most successful propagandist in history has already proven it.
Ask people “what was the most evil society in human history?” and most would say Nazi Germany. Then how could the German people ever get to the point where they not only accepted it, but were willing to die for it? The mastermind behind the process, none other than Hitler himself, explained it so simply, but we still don’t get it:
“By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell -- and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.”
That’s all anyone needs to know to turn a coward into a hero. Of course that is only in public perception, not reality. Unfortunately, elections aren’t determined by the way things are...they are determined by the way people PERCEIVE them to be.
So if that’s the problem, what’s the solution? There is only one way to counter the “Big Lie” - and that is the “Big Truth”. For every time the liar says hell is heaven, we need to point out the heat of the fire, the smell of the brimstone, and that guy over there poking people with a pitchfork. And every time the liar says heaven is hell, we need to point out the music of the harp, the softness of the cloud and the smell of the flowers in the garden. To turn Hitler’s phrase, “by means of shrewd truth, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to remind people that heaven is HEAVEN, and hell is HELL...and a hero is a HERO...and a coward and a traitor is a COWARD AND A TRAITOR”.
Everyone who sends an email or posts to a forum or talks over the water cooler is wielding our only weapon, our only hope against our heaven (as America surely is compared to other countries) turning into hell (which our country surely will be under a coward like Kerry). Over-reacting? Apparently TaRAYzaa doesn’t think so. Remember, she said it would be four more years of hell under Bush. Do you agree? Then it’s time for another dose of the Big Truth.
Well, this is already longer than I intended, but I’ll close with some other Hitlerisms I found during my research. They speak for themselves. For the love of all that’s good, folks...keep up the fight.
“I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few”
“What luck for the rulers that men do not think”
(and this one, especially for this election)
“The victor will never be asked if he told the truth”
—Adolph Hitler
> Is it a mistake for opponents of John. F. Kerry to
> question his Viet Nam service? Dick Morris thinks it
> is, on the ground that you don't attack the
> opposition's strength.
But only if it really is a strength. Suppose it's all
a sham?
Had Kerry not riled the vets by running their photo on
his website, and not made Vietnam the centerpiece of
his candidacy, we probably wouldn't be having these
discussions.
My sense is that most people were ready to concede him
his war-hero status as long as he didn't hype it. Now
that he's re-opened that crypt, I'm interested in the
autopsy. Release the records, John.
Kerry doesn't know when to leave well enough alone.
Bringing up how Bush handled the 9-11 news is another
instance.
i agree--no one was really challenging his hero status until he tried to ride it to the presidency.
the really interesting think about kerry is that he seems unable to anticipate the consequences of his behavior. he keeps bringing up issues that make him look bad. even the cookie thing shows this pattern (along with viet nam, SUVs, 9-11 etc).
in the field of psychology, the inability to be aware of the possible long-term (as opposed to immediate) consequences of one's behavior is not considered to be a good sign.
If he "enlisted," how did he come up with an officer's commission?
Great post!
And we know what that means, according to Whoopi Goldberg.
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