Ralph Peteres in today’s NYP: [1]
“John Kerry lied. Without remorse. To advance his budding political career. He tarnished the reputation of his comrades when the military was out of vogue.
Now, three decades later, camouflage is back in the fall fashion line-up. Suddenly, Kerry’s proud of his service, portraying himself as a war hero.
But it doesn’t work that way. You can’t trash those who served in front of Congress and the American people, spend your senatorial career voting against our nation’s security interests, then expect vets to love you when you abruptly change your tune.
Kerry might have won support had he apologized frankly for what he said in the early 1970s. But he no more disavowed his lies than he disclaimed the lies of Michael Moore.
Which brings us to problems two and three.
John Kerry doesn’t show a trace of integrity. Those constant flip-flops to suit the prevailing political winds are more troubling to military folks than many of the issues themselves.
Integrity matters to those in uniform. You have to be able to depend on the guy in the next foxhole — or swift boat. Trust is more important than any technology.
And John Kerry just doesn’t seem trustworthy.
Finally — and this is the one the pundits have trouble grasping, given the self-promoting nature of today’s culture — real heroes don’t call themselves heroes. Honorable soldiers or sailors don’t brag. They let their deeds speak for themselves. Some of the most off-putting words any veteran can utter are “I’m a war hero.”
Real heroes (and I’ve been honored to know some) never portray their service in grandiose terms.
Ouch!
Then again, this is pretty much of a kind with what I suggested late last winter [2].
“War heroes do not fight for their country, and then return to spend the next 30 years or so attacking both the country’s actions and call it’s fighting men ‘war criminals’, while working tirelessly to hamstring that country’s actions and giving support to that country’s sworn enemies.”
The reason he’s gotten this far is he’s always gotten a pass… nobody’s called him on this stuff. Ann Coulter adresses this point [3] a couple days ago:
“The problem with a suck-up press for Democrats is that with no adversary press to call them on it, Democrats develop wilder and wilder Walter Mitty fantasy lives until finally one day, when they are at the zenith of their political careers, someone notices that they’re not Irish, they didn’t deserve their war medals, 254 Swift Boat veterans hate them, and they didn’t spend Christmas Eve, 1968, in Cambodia. (Or that they are white-trash serial molesters and unrepentant rapists who somehow talked their way into an Arkansas governorship.)”
Personally, I have my doubts Kerry can ever recover from these revelations. Which is good, because if he ever became president, I doubt we could recover from him.