Kerry was in Vietnam, you know

Feb. 29 - Peter's not the only vet irritated with Kerry's continuous references to Vietnam and he expresses it well:

Yes, he had a decent record, but he wasn't Audie Murphy. (For those too young to remember, Murphy won every American valour decoration in WWII and became a movie actor, but never aspired to be president.) While Bush calls himself a "war president" against terrorism and seeks to bring democracy to Iraq, what has that got to do with Vietnam? Why does Kerry keep raising Vietnam when he gracefully declined to make it an issue when Bill Clinton - a guy who ducked even the National Guard - was president?

I would argue that Kerry keeps Vietnam at the forefront of his campaign because it is just about all he's got. (Emphasis added.)

One drawback faced by US Senators when they run for national office is that their voting records are public record. Maybe that's why successful candidates are often former governors, who have the luxury of explaining how they would have voted! Party discipline in the US is rarely invoked, so Kerry has no convenient excuse for his voting record on defense spending or his approval of the various strong responses to Saddam's flouting of the terms of the 1991 ceasefire during the Bush and Clinton administrations.

Usually senators who run for office proclaim they will stand on their records. Kerry, by relying on his military record rather than his voting record in the Senate, is not running a campaign, so much as indulging a trip down memory lane. And that trip, complete with his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, will re-awaken and infuriate more Vietnam vets and their families than Kerry may have counted on.

More importantly, Americans and the media should be asking "Dude, what you have you done for us lately?" If he is nominated, much less elected, on the basis of whatever he says in front of any given audience rather than his record in the Senate, then shame on us all.

I'm off to work, take care and be sure and read the NY Times article linked a few posts down and re-read Claudia Rosett's article in the Opinion Journal. Maybe some who gets numbers better than I can connect some dots?

It's about time, as reader Sammie notes, that big media outlets began to pay attention to this story. What alarms me most are the similarities in practice to the Adsam scandal.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn is blasting Kerry's voting record on military programs and expenditures - read The John Kerry Cancelled Weapons System of the Day and follow the links.

UPDATE: If you think I'm overstating Kerry's reliance on his past, read this NY Times op-ed by Kerry which talks about - you guessed it - his experiences in Vietnam. He ends the piece with what he felt in 1969. C'mon, John, the voters want more, like how you felt in 1970!

Posted by: Debbye at 10:29 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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