Wednesday - February 28, 2007

The Kerry Vendetta

I look forward every day to an other page from James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal “Best Of The Web Today”. Taranto’s wit and sarcasm are almost as nasty as mine (he doesn’t use naughty adult words). Today, he digs out a precious moment in the life of John “F’ing” Kerry who allegedly served in Vietnam (no one knows for sure since his DD-214 has been kept hidden for decades and when finally made public appears to have been slightly “fudged”, if you know what I mean).

Today we learn that JFK (no relation to the guy who abandoned thousands of Cubans at the Bay Of Pigs) is a rather vindictive sort of fellow who is determined to hold a grudge forever and a day. In other words, he’s an asshole.

This latest public display of juvenile spite should serve as a reminder of how close (a few hundred thousand votes in Ohio) we came to being forced to endure a President whose only redeeming virtue is that he makes Jacques Chirac look handsome and sound intelligent. Mais, oui!

The Politics of Self-Pity

“A Senate hearing that began with glowing tributes to a St. Louis businessman and his qualifications to become ambassador to Belgium turned bitterly divisive Tuesday after he was criticized for supporting a controversial conservative group,” the Associated Press reports from Washington:

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., grilled nominee Sam Fox about why he donated $50,000 to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 presidential race. . . . “Might I ask you what your opinion is with respect to the state of American politics as regards the politics of personal destruction?” Kerry asked near the end of the hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Fox, one of the nation’s most generous contributors to Republican candidates and causes, said he shared Kerry’s concerns that politics “has become mean and destructive.”

Fox said he didn’t recall who asked him to give to the group and blamed partisans on both sides for contributing to so-called 527 groups that are not subject to conventional campaign finance rules.

“So is that your judgment that you would bring to the ambassadorship, that two wrongs make a right?” Kerry asked.

This is the second time this week that “the politics of personal destruction” has come up; the first, as we noted Monday, was when Sen. Hillary Clinton, attempted to impose a rule that no one was to discuss the impeachment of her husband and the illicit sexual acts attendant to it.

Mrs. Clinton’s position on this makes a certain amount of practical sense. She is, after all, running for president, and the impeachment raised questions about the Clintons’ marriage, and about Mrs. Clinton’s character, that every voter ought to find troubling. Best for her if she can persuade her opponents, the media and everyone else that discussing her character is simply bad form. (Good luck!)

But why did Kerry spend more than half his allotted time badgering the prospective ambassador to Belgium about money he gave to a group that was mean to Kerry? This just seems small and pathetic. It’s akin to Mrs. Clinton’s lone “no” votes on the 2001 confirmations of Viet Dinh and Michael Chertoff to Justice Department posts. Dinh and Chertoff had both worked on Whitewater investigations.

Kerry no doubt genuinely feels the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth treated him unfairly. It’s even possible that they did; 40 years after the fact, we certainly can’t say for sure that their eyewitness accounts were true and Kerry’s was false. He also seems to feel that this cost him the presidency, which he deserved.

But life is unfair, and you don’t become president because you “deserve” to, but because the voters choose you. Maturity consists in significant part in the ability to accept loss and to rise above it. That Kerry is still wallowing in self-pity more than two years after the fact tells us something damning about his character.

Posted by The Skipper     on 02/28/2007 at 02:21 PM   
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