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MIND'S EYE

 

 

Anybody But Kerry

Robert M. Price

Can’t we question John Kerry’s patriotism? No Republican is willing to do it for fear of the propaganda reprisals such questioning would bring. But little notice will be taken of what I say. In fact, I doubt you will remember any of it fifteen minutes after you finish reading this! And why should you? Anyway, I dare to question the unquestionable in this case.

Did I hear right? Kerry served in Viet Nam for a grand total of four months. Hey, that’s four months longer than I would want to be caught dead there. I’ll give him that. But it does make me question what right he had to sound off as an insider and an expert on the war during his tenure as leader of Viet Nam Veterans Against the War. How on earth, in a mere four months, could he have gathered the "information" he subsequently gave to Congress that U.S. forces routinely committed unspeakable, Medieval atrocities upon the Vietnamese peasantry? Using civilians for target practice and such. Especially since he denies having been party to any of it. Where would he have gotten this "information," which sounds even now like scurrilous anti-American propaganda to me? If he could have witnessed these horrors during the brief time he served there, then anybody and everybody else would have seen them, too. They must have been routine. But there is just no reason to think so.

If Kerry’s courage during wartime was incarnated in that medal he gloats over, then it seems to me he contemptuously cast that patriotism aside when, as a show of disgust with American foreign policy, he joined other anti-war Vets in throwing his medal over a wall. Seems to me that’s even worse than burning your draft card. Let’s not forget that Benedict Arnold was a genuine American patriot, too, before he decided he wasn’t getting enough recognition and switched sides.

The past is water under the bridge, but it may be worth looking at if you want to know where the river is headed. And I don’t think Kerry has changed course. Listen to every single thing he says about Iraq, and how it is a quagmire Bush never should have led us into. Ask yourself, "Where is this all leading?" I very much doubt that Kerry means he has some superior plan to minimize American deaths or to facilitate Iraqi national unity and peace. If he had such ideas, and if he were a patriot, instead of a political opportunist of the worst stripe, he would share those splendid corrections with the current Administration. Wouldn’t that make him look great?

But you know where he’s headed. He is headed back to his 60s anti-war default mode. He is headed in the direction of Spain and cowardly disengagement so as, he must think, to get the terrorists to stop being mad at us. But by now don’t we know, from the terrorists themselves, that it is precisely such cut-and-run tactics that signals we are weak and wounded prey, that invites their attacks?

I don’t think that one can be a patriot without being a nationalist. You can’t be an enthusiastic American in the one sense without the other. If, like Kerry and his tribe of liberals, you have transferred your loyalties to Internationalism, multilateralism, if you no longer think it incumbent upon you to look to American interests first, then I say you are not patriotic. Your views may be higher and nobler than my "primitive" patriotism, but admit it! Admit that you have "transcended" patriotism to get to something better and higher. But if you said so, then no one who is patriotic could be hoodwinked into voting for you.

We dare not elect President this man who, years ago, tossed away his patriotism in a grandstanding gesture he would now like us to forget.

 

Copyright©2004 by Robert M Price
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