SwiftVets.com

[LewWaters]

In his latest “Cut and Run” scheme to help lose the war on terror, John Kerry has now labeled his “Cut and Run” strategy as “over the horizon.” On June 22, 2006, before the Senate, speaking in support of his ill-fated and failed amendment 4442, Kerry said, “We maintain an over-the-horizon force to protect our security interests in the region.”

Catchy phrases aside, this one just reminds me too much of Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” in the classic movie, “The Wizard of Oz.”

John Kerry, the new “Cowardly Lion,” talks brave and bold, acting as if he hadn’t lost the 2004 Presidential election to George W. Bush. For reasons known only to him, Kerry feels he must ‘take charge’ and just as he recommended towards the end of the Viet Nam war (you do realize he served in Viet Nam), it becomes necessary to abandon a new and fledgling ally just when they may need us the most.

From the same speech above, Kerry seems to feel we must “hold the Iraqis feet to the fire” in order to force them to stand up and fight for their nation. To accomplish this Kerry ‘suggests,’ “Redeploying U.S. troops is necessary for success in Iraq, and it is necessary to be able to fight a more effective war on terror.” A little over a week earlier, this same Senator proposed another amendment calling for “the withdrawal of American Combat Troops by the end of 2006.” Of course, this went down in flames, as it deserved to.

To win, we must “withdraw,” according to Kerry at first. Now, since that measure failed, he sees “redeployment” as the answer and path to victory. Or is it the path to his relevance, in his mind? I guess the thought of just supporting our troops and ensuring they have the tools and materials needed for this long fight ahead doesn’t occur to him.

“Redeployment” coming from Kerry is a relatively new stand as historically he urges for “withdrawal” when it is apparent our troops are winning the battles. In 1971, during his infamous “testimony” before the anti-war Fulbright Commission, in urging an ‘immediate withdrawal’ from Viet Nam, Senator Kerry said, “we cannot fight communism all over the world.”

In the struggle against Communism in the mid-eighties, Kerry took the side of the Communist leader in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega. During his failed bid for the Presidency in 2004, he stated, "I'm proud that I stood against Ronald Reagan, not with him, when his intelligence agencies were abusing the Constitution of the United States and when he was running an illegal war in Central America."

In 1993, after the “Black Hawk Down” incident, then President Clinton proposed a six-month “draw down” of US forces in Somalia. In a speech on the Senate floor, Kerry is quoted as, “There is no doubt in my mind that the U.N. strategy for establishing security in Mogadishu has been a failure. But that is not a sufficient reason for the United States to withdraw at this moment, to cut and run.” Yet, in the same speech, he also said, “I think the President's[Clinton] plan, as currently outlined, will allow us to step aside responsibly.” As I see it, retreat is retreat, whether immediate or gradual.

Since our departure from Somalia, one only need read the daily news of late to see what chaos that country became and recently how terrorists have fully conquered the country and are now imposing another repressive totalitarian regime.

Of the first Gulf War, Kerry’s position was in opposition of liberating Kuwait from the invasion of Saddam Hussein. During his speech to that effect, he said, “If we go to war in the next few days, it will not be because our immediate vital interests are so threatened and we have no other choice. It is not because of nuclear, chemical, biological weapons when, after all, Saddam Hussein had all those abilities or was working toward them for years--even while we armed him and refused to hold him accountable for using some of them. It will be because we set an artificial deadline. As we know, those who have been in war, there is no artificial wound, no artificial consequence of war.” Apparently, he now feels an “artificial deadline” is appropriate for withdrawal, excuse me, “redeployment” of our troops from the second go around with Saddam Hussein.

Oddly enough, once a Democrat President was in the White House and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was still being a pain in the world’s neck, Mr. Kerry went before the Senate in November of 1997 and in a speech titled “We must be firm with Saddam Hussein,” he said, “Even after the overwhelming defeat that the coalition forces visited upon Iraq in and near Kuwait in the Desert Storm conflict, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's truculence has continued unabated. In the final days of that conflict, a fateful decision was made not to utterly vanquish the Iraqi Government and armed forces….”

In the same speech, encouraging a United Nations strike against Saddam, Kerry stated, “This should not be a strike consisting only of a handful of cruise missiles hitting isolated targets primarily of presumed symbolic value. But how long this military action might continue and how it may escalate should Saddam remain intransigent and how extensive would be its reach are for the Security Council and our allies to know and for Saddam Hussein ultimately to find out.” “Should the resolve of our allies wane to pursue this matter until an acceptable inspection process has been reinstituted--which I hope will not occur and which I am pleased to say at this moment does not seem to have even begun--the United States must not lose its resolve to take action.” What a difference the party in the White House seems to make on Kerry.

John Kerry’s infamous “I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” gaffe, in regards to President Bush’s handing of Iraq after September 11, 2001, is legendary now among misstatements made by any politician.

Before that, in 2002, he made another speech to the Senate addressing the upcoming War in Iraq and said, “But none of the underlying realities of the threat, none of the underlying realities of the choices we face are altered because they are, in fact, the same as they were in 1991 when we discovered those weapons when the teams went in, and in 1998 when the teams were kicked out.” He also said, “He miscalculated the invasion of Kuwait. He miscalculated America's responses to it. He miscalculated the result of setting oil rigs on fire. He miscalculated the impact of sending Scuds into Israel. He miscalculated his own military might. He miscalculated the Arab world's response to his plight. He miscalculated in attempting an assassination of a former President of the United States. And he is miscalculating now America's judgments about his miscalculations.”

After some rhetoric leaning away from going to war in Iraq, Kerry, in the same speech said, “In the wake of September 11, who among us can say, with any certainty, to anybody, that those weapons might not be used against our troops or against allies in the region? …. And while the administration has failed to provide any direct link between Iraq and the events of September 11, can we afford to ignore the possibility that Saddam Hussein might accidentally, as well as purposely, allow those weapons to slide off to one group or other in a region where weapons are the currency of trade?”

Yet again, in his effort to gain support for his first withdrawal plan, Kerry now says, “"We were misled, we were given evidence that was not true," Kerry said. "It was wrong, and I was wrong to vote [for it]."

Just this week, in garnering support for his failed amendment 4442, He said, “I believe it is a more effective way to put America in a position of strength, in a position to fight the war on terror in Somalia, in Afghanistan, and in the other places of the world where al-Qaida is growing.” (Congressional Record, June 22, 2006 pages S6328 and S6329)

In what I can only call a true Emerald City moment, he now calls for “fighting the war on terror in Somalia?” After supporting Clinton’s withdrawal, even though it was a ‘gradual’ withdrawal, or, a step aside responsibly, if you prefer, and once claiming “we cannot fight Communism all over the world,” our Cowardly Lion seems to be humming ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ as he wishes to redeploy our troops out of Iraq, just as we are building the Iraqis up and winning again and set them back towards Somalia.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, Dorothy. His only consistency is in his inconsistency. Scarier yet is that this man came within a hairsbreadth of the Presidency of the United States. If only we could click the heels of our Ruby Slippers and whisk Kerry out of the Senate and relegate him to the scrap pile of irrelevancy.


Lew

[shawa]

Wow, Lew, what a great piece. You really nailed it - The Cowardly Lion somewhere over the rainbow!
In reading all the dichotomies of Kerry you've put together in one piece, I have to conclude he is certifiable!
A loony lost in la la land.
What does the song say? Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue.
And dreams that I DARE to dream really do come true.
Uh Huh, keep on dreaming, john-boi.
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776)

[LimaCharlie]

[NortonPete]

Lew,
That was a well written and excellently researched post. Its an example of
why this site and its contributors are so valuable even today.

If a Kerry staffer were to read your post it certainly would give them pause before sticking their hand into a fan again.

[Dane]

In military lingo, "withdraw" is pretty much the same as "retreat". We started using the term "redeploy" around 1990 to indicate "returning to base after completion of the deployment´s mission". (Don´t think too hard about the fact that, grammatically, "redeploy" means to "deploy again" which automatically indicates that the unit is back at its home base!)

You´ll find that the cut-and-run advocates now use the term "redeploy" across the spectrum because they don´t want to give the impression that we are "retreating" as we did from Somalia. Clinton´s euphemistic use of "draw-down" doesn´t hide the fact that he ordered the troops returned to CONUS without having accomplished their mission. That´s a retreat or a pull-out by any other name.

Dane in Chile

[Tall Texan]

The United States Senate is now a place of "Dis-Honor" the members there go about their rounds, shaking hands with this fraud, patting him on the back, having lunch with him, they sit on committees with him , they allow him to be in on top security information , he has knowledge of the works at Sandia Lab, ect. they know the truth yet there they sit not doing one thing...

History will come soon to judge those who do nothing about this thing aka
Lt. Kerry, and it will not be a nice thing, for truth and true History does not like to be made light of nor its truth made into lies and fraud.

Judgement will come and soon.
_________________
A good beed counts for something

[fortdixlover]

[LewWaters]

Lurch sure likes his "catchy phrases."

In the latest email from his camp, in support of 3 Democrats (Maria Cantwell, included) and begging for more of our money, he starts the letter with;

[Aristotle The Hun]

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10024

WASHINGTON -- The comic career of Senator Jean-Francois Kerry is picking up steam, or gas, as the case may be. This inveterate windbag is, according to the New York Times, reopening the Swift Boat controversy of 2004 that did such damage to his presidential prospects when hundreds of the Vietnam War veterans who served with him deflated his reckless boasts of military gloire. He has undertaken this quixotic mission claiming that he can repristinate his military record despite the Swifties' evidence against it. Then the delusory senator from Massachusetts seems to think he will be a shoo-in for the presidency in 2008.

Well, I for one shall delight in reviewing the Swifties' corpus delicti once again. There are his Purple Hearts that his officers deny authorizing. There are the missing medical records needed to substantiate his decorations. There are the questions the Swifties raised about his honorable discharge, a mysterious discharge not issued until several years after he was out of the Navy and then only issued by President Jimmy Carter in the midst of his amnesty program for draft dodgers. And there is all the controversy about young Kerry's dealings with the North Vietnamese in Paris while the war was going on and he was still in the service. Doubtless there are more indelicacies to be examined. Frankly I doubt the American electorate will gain any higher opinion of a presidential candidate who in 1971 appeared before Congress to claim that American soldiers "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads" and otherwise mistreated the Vietnamese.

Kerry's statement is long and lurid, and the Swifties gladly reproduced a tape of it during the 2004 election. Now these veterans are being harassed by the senator's supporters with crank calls in the night and venomous postings on the liberal website HuffingtonPost.com. On that celebrity-ridden site the names and personal information of more than a dozen Swift Boat veterans were posted by such "trusted" Huffington Post celebrities as "SatanLivesinUSA." Could this be Barbra Streisand's username? At any rate, this eminence wrote on June 24: "SwiftBoatVets who need some Black Ops done on them. I have some very good ideas I gleaned from 'CIA BOOK of DIRTY TRICKS' Don't get mad, get EVEN." Minutes later another "trusted" celebrity poster repeatedly pasted these threatening words on the page and on another Huffington Post post.

The American Spectator's indefatigable reporter, Dave Holman, found all this and reports that "Aside from one or two complaints, fellow commenters did not object to the posting of the information or the threats." Within hours the veterans were receiving threatening calls. In the early hours of June 25 one Swiftie, Van Odell, got three in four minutes, the last from a man who inquired, "I want to know why you lied about John Kerry...Traitors must die. We will get you." Holman notes that the Swifties have reported these calls to law enforcement but that they had no luck in getting Huffington Post to address the harassment. The comments remained posted until Holman reached Katharine Zaleski, the site's news editor, on Tuesday afternoon at her unlisted telephone number. As I say, Holman is indefatigable.

This sort of harassment is not new to the veterans and it will probably continue. At least one other site still posts their telephone numbers. Yet, as one Swiftie told me, "These men will not be intimidated. The SwiftVets are three hundred strong. They include Kerry's entire chain of command while in Vietnam, the vast majority of officers who served with him, the attending physician to his alleged wounds, and his longest serving crew member. They have raised legitimate questions." This Swiftie concludes that the questions can be answered if Senator Kerry allows "a release of his military record by the execution of the Form 180, permitting the media to look closely at the truth behind Kerry's fiction." The fact that Kerry has not allowed these records to be opened to the general media is suspicious, no? The fact that he continues to make his military record an issue is still more evidence that a delusional man can be a funny man.

__________________________________________________________

I think they are on to him.

Sam
_________________
Deportè Monsieur Kerrè

[NortonPete]

Will we get a chance to air The Swift Boat Veterans "They Served" again?

Will I get the calling to send whatever money I can?

Can I put more postcard responses from Weymouth D. Symmes
the Treasurer of SBVT thanking me for a donation ( however small )
on my wall?

PERHAPS, MAYBE YES.

We wait , we wait and watch and prepare...

[GenrXr]

Great article Lew.
_________________
"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy

[army72]

[Harvuskong]