Essence of Kerry
Mark Steyn has posted his hilearious, heartening National Review article on his Web site: "The Kerryness of Kerry." Here's Steyn's take on Kerry as a campaigner:
I underestimated Kerry [as a primary candidate] because I made the mistake of seeing too much of him in 2003 – in Woodsville, Plymouth, Littleton and other obscure stops on the New Hampshire primary trail. He was awful. And he was just as awful in the huge auditorium at Nashua High School in late January as he’d been at the Barge Inn in Woodsville the previous summer. The only difference was that he was now awful with a full supporting cast – the “band of brothers”, Max Cleland, Ted Kennedy, Patrick Kennedy, Jeanne Shaheen… When the chorus line momentarily parted and you got a glimpse of the candidate, he still seemed like a plodding single-digit fifth-place guy.Given his self-presentation as a war hero combined with the Democratic attack on President Bush's Air National Guard Service, one aspect of the Kerryness of Kerry that we should explore is his contribution to the torment of the American prisoners of war held by the North Vietnamese. Today's Frontpage features a column summarizing the new documentary: "Stolen Honor." Most of the quotes from former POWs in the column simply criticize Kerry's antiwar behavior in a general way. However, the column quote from the film's interview with retired Captain and former POW James Warner is devastating:
Primary season gives the party’s electorate a chance to rattle the leading candidate and make him a better campaigner. This time round the leading candidates – Dean, Clark – rattled the electorate and in their stampede to the fire exits they wound up sweeping the quintessential “None of the Above” man to victory. They made a very basic miscalculation: Howard Dean was a dull centrist governor pretending to be nuts, John Kerry is a nut passing himself off as a dull centrist.
The interrogator went through all of these statements from John Kerry. He starts pounding on the table see, “Here, this naval officer, he admits that you are a criminal, and you deserve punishment”...I dind’t know what was going to come next. And for the rest of the time that we were in that camp I was very ill at ease...[John Kerry] abandoned his comrades. He burned up his “Band of Brothers” membership card when he did that.
UPDATE: See also Dexter Lehtinen's first-hand account at NRO: "Wounds that never heal."
