Kerry On, My Wayward Son

Kerry On, My Wayward Son - I have a few Democrat friends who think John Kerry provides a mix of intelligence and courage that they feel is absent in the current administration.

But a little digging turns up some signs of what a John Kerry administration might have in store for us. This is a clip from a P.J. O'Rourke article, Guns, Goons and Gold, which appeared in Rolling Stone (and his here excerpted from Republican Party Reptile), in which Senator Kerry is involved in observing the 1986 Philippine election - the one where rampant electoral fraud led in short order to the deposing of Ferdinand Marcos:

Most of the Potomac Parakeets were a big disappointment. Massachusetts senator John Kerry was a founding member of the Vietname Veterans Against the War, but he was a bath toy in this fray.

On Sunday night, two days after the election, thirty of the computer operators from COMELEC [the Philippine election commission] walked off the job, protesting that vote figures were being juggled. Aquino supporters and NAMFREL [opposition party] volunteers took the operators, most of them young women, to a church, and hundreds of people formed a protective barrier around them.

Village Voice reporter Joe Conason and I had been tipped off about the walkout, and when we got to the church, we found Bea Zobel, one of Cory Aquino's top aies, in a tizzy. "The women are terrified," she said. "They're scared to go home. They don't know what to do. We don't know what to do." Joe and I suggested that Mrs. Zobel go to the Manila Hotel and bring back some members of the Congressional observer team. She came back with Kerry, who did nothing.

Kerry later said that he didn't talk to the COMELEC employees then because he wasn't allowed. This is ridiculous. He was ushered into an area that had been cordoned off from the press and the crowd and where the computer operators were sitting. To talk to the women, all he would have had to do was raise his voice. Why he was reluctant, I can't tell you. I can tell you what any red-blooded representative of the U.S. government should have done. He should have shouted, "If you're frightened for your safety, I'll take you to the American embassy, and damn the man who tries to stop me." But all Kerry did was walk around like a male model in a concerned and thoughtful pose.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Can you imagine what would have happened had Donald Rumsfeld replaced Kerry in the delegation?

Didn't we just survive eight years of that kind of leadership? Sorry, Democrat friends. Leaving aside Kerry's endless personal circumlocutions; the man doesn't have anything I want in that office.

Posted by Mitch at May 28, 2003 06:03 AM