Posted on 08/13/2004 5:25:33 PM PDT by CHARLITE
The Oddest Couple and Their Hidden Agendas Joan Swirsky Friday, Aug. 13, 2004 The average lifespan for American men is around 74 years, and around 80 for women. So you would think that people like John Kerry and his wife, who have both been on this earth for over 60 years, would have gotten their acts together enough to convey some sense of internal coherence, personae that have at least a smidgen of authenticity. I don’t get either coherence or authenticity from John Kerry or Teresa Heinz Kerry, whether they’re together or apart. What I do get is a hidden agenda that bodes ill for America's future - agendas that should mobilize all sane voters to blanket our country in red on Nov. 2.
My first close-up of Teresa Thiersten Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry was on the written page – a biographical sketch that described her unusual background: born in Mozambique of Portuguese descent, surgeon father, educated in a Geneva language school with classmate Kofi Annan, 25-year marriage to republican congressman H. John Heinz, mother of three sons, inheritor of vast wealth at Heinz’s violent death in an airplane crash, and then a three-year courtship and subsequent marriage to heiress-lusting Sen. John Kerry (albeit it with a pre-nup!).
The bio read that Teresa had catapulted her $500 million inheritance from Heinz into a billion-dollar fortune. And she had changed her lifelong, card-carrying republican credentials (and, ostensibly, beliefs) as well as her Heinz surname (to Heinz Kerry) about the same time that it became clear to her that Sen. Kerry might become a presidential candidate.
I was mystified that a woman who appeared – on paper – to have such substance, and who was so actively devoted to her republican husband’s life would marry the most liberal Democrat in the entire U.S. Senate, according to objective measures of Kerry’s votes during his nearly two decades in the office. Not So “Quirky” or “Charming”
In her interview, Teresa struck me as both depressed and angry, sort of a Bella Abzug on Prozac and one too many tranquilizers. Actually, that’s not quite fair to the former congresswoman from New York who was known for wearing eccentric hats, as does Teresa. But she was decidedly not a doldrums type and never rolled her eyes or yawned when political people she presumably agreed with were on the stump, as Teresa does routinely when her husband is in front of a microphone.
Maybe Teresa is not on psychotropic drugs. But then why the spacey affect, the inability to make direct eye contact and the ultra-soft voice – especially when spewing forth her trademark invective?
I suspect that Teresa, who is only running for co-president, has a lot to hide from the American public. And I know that the left-wing media that share her “values” are deeply complicit in not telling that public what they know about her hidden agenda. The Evita Complex
One of her priorities, as clearly seen at the recent Democrat convention in Boston, is that she can’t wait to start running the country! This was evidenced by the introduction she gave for her husband, which for the most part included her vision for our future.
Invoking feminist dogma that was retro even 10 years ago, she said, “My only hope is that, one day soon, women – who have all earned the right to their opinions – instead of being labeled opinionated, will be called smart or well-informed, just as men are. …”
Thank you, Teresa, for letting America know what the most pressing issue of this election is all about!
Then she launched into her – and her husband’s – socialist view of America, focusing on every issue except the war on terrorism! Using the royal pronoun, she said: “… we can give (my emphasis) every family and every child access to affordable health care, a good education, and the tools to become self-reliant … protect our nation’s security without sacrificing our civil liberties … [address] global climate change and … [create] the alliances that bind the community of nations. …”
Coyly tilting her head, her hands crossed modestly across her chest in a gesture reminiscent of Third World “first ladies,” Teresa wanted the public to see her as Lady Bountiful, bringing love, understanding and empathy to all the people who constitute her own and Kerry’s ever-burgeoning Misery Index. But her humble demeanor didn’t erase the picture of an immensely wealthy matron whose possible role as first lady raises legitimate questions that she has arrogantly refused to answer, such as why she hasn’t released her tax returns or how many thousands of outsourced jobs with substandard pay there are at the Heinz corporation.
Leftist Money – Benevolent or Corrupt?
But those are small-potato questions compared to ones raised by her “philanthropic” work. According to an intelligence newsletter of WorldNetDaily, between 1995-2001, Teresa gave more than $4 million to the Tides Foundation, which supports:
Numerous anti-war groups, including Ramsey Clark's International Action Center (the same Clark who offered to defend Saddam Hussein).
A joint venture with the Democratic Justice Fund, headed by billionaire America-hater George Soros, which seeks to ease restrictions on Muslim immigration from "terrorist" states.
The Council for American-Islamic Relations, whose leaders are known to have close ties to the terrorist group Hamas. The National Lawyers Guild, initially a communist front, that boasts the membership of attorney Lynne Stewart, who was arrested for helping her client, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman – the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing – communicate with terror cells in Egypt.
The "Barrio Warriors," a radical Hispanic group whose primary goal is to return all of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas to Mexico.
Many of the most notorious anti-consumer groups in U.S. history, such as Green Peace and the Natural Resources Defense Council, etc.
Independent Media Center (IMC), a bastion of far-left radical viewpoints. Then there is the Institute for Global Communications (IGC), a clearinghouse for leftist propagandists, anarchists and anti-American advocates. IGC is a massive international electronic communications network that Tides gave to the U.N. Its offshoot is the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), which is also funded by Soros as well as by Bill Moyers and the Ford Foundation.
According to an investigative report by Judy McLeod in the Canada Free Press, the multi-tentacled IGC/APC system now serves “activists in more than 133 countries.” In September of 2001, one of its networks, the Earth Island Institute, carried the headline "U.S. Responds to Terrorist Attacks with Self-Righteous Arrogance." (Tellingly, just six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Teresa urged Americans to try to "understand the roots of international terror" and said that that the assault on our nation was best viewed as an "isolated catastrophe.")
Quarterly meetings of APC are held online, but “reporters, like other members of the public at large, are unwelcome,” McLeod says, adding, “Teresa Heinz-Kerry, who promised ‘to be me in the White House’ … already has a leg up at Manhattan’s scandal-ridden U.N. headquarters.”
Teresa’s involvement with Tides has never waned, including the foundation’s sending hundreds of millions of dollars to groups that protested the invasion of Iraq.
According to www.activistcash.com, “Tides does two things better than any other foundation or charity in the U.S. today: it routinely obscures the sources of its tax-exempt millions and makes it difficult (if not impossible) to discern how the funds are actually being used. [It] behaves less like a philanthropy than a money-laundering enterprise … taking money from other foundations and spending it as the donor requires.”
While citing the “tangled web” and “flim-flammery” of Tides, the Web site notes that its practices “appear to be perfectly legal.”
Too Many Unanswered Questions
Fine. But shouldn’t the public know the “real deal” Teresa better than the image she tries to project of "peace be with you" and "love is all you need"? Just as Howard Dean’s wife said she would continue to practice medicine if her husband were elected president, Teresa has stated that she will continue to be involved in her charities should Kerry ascend to the White House.
Since there has never been a first lady with a billion dollars and such internationally far-reaching business interests and left-wing political causes, why hasn’t the journalistic branch of the Democratic National Committee (meaning the overwhelming majority of left-wing newspapers and TV outlets) insisted on finding out more about the self-anointed Momma T?
Under law, high-level office holders must divest their assets into blind trusts so that no policy they propose or enact can be influenced by their own holdings. Not so of first ladies. How will Teresa’s radical left-wing philosophy affect our nation’s domestic and foreign policies?
If Tides continues to fund Hamas and other terrorist groups thanks to the Heinz largesse, how would that influence the foreign policy of a president who has vowed to fight terrorism?
How could that negatively influence America’s longstanding and friendly relationship with the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel? It appears that the handwriting is already on the wall. After all, in his 5,400-word acceptance of the presidential nomination (while Al Jazeera broadcast from inside the convention hall), Kerry touched on every “value” and priority his administration would pursue but – astoundingly and for the first time in over 50 years – failed to mention Israel even once!
If any of the Tides Foundation’s recipients are American Muslim causes or groups, would this bring about a weakening of the Patriot Act?
How about the advocates of "nonviolent solutions" that already receive money from Tides? Wouldn’t this pose a conflict between aggressive military action that the president might take and the groups Tides subsidizes?
What about the conflicts of interest that would arise as a result of the nearly two-hundreds Heinz plants in foreign countries (among them France, Germany, Russia and the People’s Republic of China) and the zillions of dollars of revenue they rake in? Wouldn’t this compromise dealing with these countries in a way that is best for America?
In light of an erupting Oil for Food scandal and growing evidence (as documented by Claudia Rosett in the Wall St. Journal and the Weekly Standard) that Saddam Hussein may have used some of the $10 billion he stole from that program to bankroll bin Laden’s Al Qaida network, including the plot to attack America on Sept. 11) where would Monsieur et Madame Kerry stand, given her longtime relationship with Kofi Annan and immense financial interests in the U.N. and his ongoing advocacy of handing American foreign policy over to the U.N.? No wonder the Kerry-Heinz allies in the media have avoided these questions like anthrax and instead concentrated on the "safe" controversies involving Teresa’s "Shove it! " or "un-American" remarks or one from a dug-up book in which, in her last incarnation, she called the Democratic Party "putrid."
In fact, the media have failed to investigate not only the questions above but also the people who work for the Kerry campaign while drawing checks from the Heinz Family Philanthropies, as well as Teresa’s longtime relationship with Enron’s chairman, Ken Lay.
With financial and “social” interests like these, Teresa’s agenda is something all Americans should worry about.
Indeed, Teresa is only one-half of the couple that hopes to lead America into a new golden age of … Carterism! Yes, the same leftist Jimmy Carter who engineered the fall of Iran into the hands of Ayatollah Khomeini, effectively ushering in the age of Islamic terrorism that, to this day, controls the country and terrorizes the rest of the world. The same Jimmy Carter who shared his presidential box at the recent convention with none other than the anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-truth fakeumentary-maker Michael Moore. The same Jimmy Carter who Kerry chose to speak on his behalf at the convention.
To Kerry, “Real” Is As Real Pretends To Be
Like Teresa’s, Kerry’s background – on paper – is impressive. But the “real deal” – the substance of the man – is manifestly missing. That is because he has spent his entire adult life concealing his hollow center.
Kerry started as the great imitator, following the lead of his hero, John F. Kennedy, by joining the Navy to fight in Vietnam in a Swift Boat (rather than a PT-109). From his privileged background, it would not seem to have been the logical choice, but hero worship does funny things to people.
Nevertheless, Vietnam and its immediate aftermath seemed to animate Kerry (it appears for the first and last time in his life). Whatever aggression was concealed behind the facade of his Swiss boarding school and Ivy League educations emerged full bore in Vietnam, as evidenced by his own testimony to having slaughtered innocents, torched villages and committed war crimes (which he then, weirdly, went back and re-enacted for the camera).
In a sustained rush of adrenaline over a period of four months, he “earned” a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, remarkably sustaining no scars, no internal injuries, no surgery and not one day off to “recover.” No wonder over 250 of his fellow Swift Vets (www.swiftvets.com) have repudiated Kerry in their new book, “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out against John Kerry,” and have disbanded themselves from Kerry’s “Band of Brothers.”
It was the mood of the times and the liberal state of Massachusetts that voted Kerry into office, where he has remained for the past two decades, espousing far-left cant and voting consistently to punish the country that afforded him such wealth and privilege - particularly our military, defense and intelligence systems.
Throughout, he has been the great banal imitator – abandoning his far-left posture in the primary campaign to further out-left his opponent Howard Dean.
Still the Great Pretender
Of course, now that Kerry has become the nominee of his party, he has abandoned Dean’s ideology in favor of imitating none other than … President Bush! The poll-sensitive candidate knows that the American public thinks the president is doing a good job, so he has segued from radical leftist to a more conservative position.
For instance, to take but one example, the flip-flopping senator who has never contemplated a fetus he didn’t think worthy of aborting – even at eight months’ gestation – pronounced that he “believed” life begins at conception!
Kerry also has the rage factor that permeates the “all we need is love” left. Liberals like him and Teresa are, in general, angry … but why? It’s easy to explain the liberalism of unionists and recent immigrants because they depend on “help” to earn a decent wage or have their rights protected. But elitists are a different story.
The Pathology of Liberalism
Without going into arcane psychological theory, I believe that underneath their sophisticated, educated, privileged pasts, they are people who, in the secret recesses of their beings, hate themselves.
In fact, none of the screeching, splenetic hysterics of Democrats like Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, spinmeister James Carville, Al Sharpton, or the more passive-aggressive, curare-tipped-dart-throwers like Tom Daschle, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton and John and Teresa themselves – the list is endless – can quite square the bad feelings they have with the fabulously wealthy and privileged lives they live.
So, like all liberals, they “project” their bad feelings onto the people they really blame: the “grown up” conservatives who have high expectations, set rules, demand accountability, anticipate results and don’t tolerate excuses.
Unlike conservatives, who look to themselves when placing blame and finding solutions, liberals attribute to others what is wrong with themselves – just as Kerry has done over the course of his entire public life.
All this is a result of the pathological narcissism that characterizes leftist ideologues. Narcissism lies on the spectrum of other serious pathologies like borderline personality and sociopathy, and is characterized by an overweening obsession with the self.
As journalist Eric Alan Beltt explains (http://www.opinioneditorials.com/freedomwriters/ebeltt_20040805.html) they are motivated by the desperate need to feel good, superior in intelligence and morality, admired by peers (in academia, the legal profession, the news and entertainment media, elite social circles and other venues where liberalism is rife) and to avoid ostracism. Their activism, Beltt says, is only relevant to them as long as it enhances their “image” and … makes them feel good!
It’s logical, Beltt says, that their hatred of President Bush is so ferocious. “With a thriving economy, a newly free and sovereign Iraq (and Afghanistan) making large steps towards democracy and stability, huge gains in the war against international terrorism, massive funding for the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and many other wonderful accomplishments ... in the making,” he says, “you’d think liberals would like the President. But … they hate him with a passion [because] he’s the personification of their insignificance on the world stage,” something that is intolerable to the fragile egos of narcissists.
Are You There? I Can’t Hear You!
Finally, Kerry embodies the Empty Barrel/Hollow Man syndrome, although he has elevated to an art form the pretense of substance and sounding authentic. From his New England upper-crust background, he learned that a fixed gaze is often mistaken for sincerity and that stentorian speech is able to fool a lot of people a lot of the time, never mind that he answers every question with the same valence, whether about Wendy’s salsa or WMD.
These are behaviors common among narcissists and sociopaths, which allow them to pass polygraph tests while lying through their teeth.
Empty of convictions and hollow at the center, Kerry – a weak man at his core – is incapable of saying, “This is who I am and this is what I stand for!” No wonder he is never able to take a stand and stick to it. Only people with an internal moral compass, like President Bush, can do that. People like Kerry, who value personal gain above the good of his country, cannot and never have.
Real Is What Real Does
As Senator Zell Miller, (D-GA.)has brought to our attention, Kerry has "introduced 500 pieces of legislation, seven of which have been adopted … two or three of those concerned renaming bridges [and] a couple involved research grants … and a couple were giveaway programs, small loans … but he has voted against virtually every defense weapons system bill that's come down the pike."
There you have Kerry in a nutshell: a man of no particular career accomplishment who has always relied on the agenda of his far-left constituency to guide his actions.
Perhaps journalist Mark Steyn has said it best. Kerry’s “default position is the conventional wisdom of the Massachusetts Left: on foreign policy, foreigners know best; on trade, the labor unions know best; on government, bureaucrats know best; on defense, graying pony-tailed nuclear-freeze reflex-anti-militarists know best; on the wine list, he knows best.”
Joan Swirsky is a New-York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com
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Shove it!!
But the Stepford couple is so worthy of a repeat.
ping
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