The John Kerry Post of the Day

My latest discovery about my favorite cheese-eating surrendermonkey-looking Ketchup King cum Presidential candidate:

Well, it's official. The Swift Boat Veterans aren't the only veterans who don't think too much of America's most famous triple Purple Heart winner.

Kerry gave a speech before the national convention of the American Legion yesterday, a day after President Bush addressed the group. Maybe it was the fact that the meeting was held in Nashville. Maybe it was the fact that military voters skew Republican anyway. Or maybe Kerry was having a bad hair day.

Whatever it was, Kerry did not have a great day. The New York Post reports...

There were no boos yesterday. A boo from a legionnaire is to sit on his hands, not applaud and say nothing.

But there was no shortage of warm hands and long silences at the Opryland Resort Hotel, where 5,000 American Legionnaires sat stoically listening to Sen. John Kerry.

"He was up there taking credit for everything the American Legion had achieved. He was talking about 'we' and 'I,' " said Ed Reiter of Long Island, who emphasized he was speaking for himself — not his delegation.

Sen. Kerry was, in fact, a serial user of the royal we:

"After returning from Vietnam, I saw vets who weren't getting the care they needed, so we fought hard and got additional funding for VA hospitals.

"We founded the first medical-assistance programs in the country . . . We stood with veterans by getting the GI Bill extended."

Added Reiter, "He talks like he was around 86 years ago when the Legion was founded. I can't remember him ever helping out veterans."

Michael Martin, a Viet vet from Nashville, said, "Today would have been a great time for him to apologize to his comrades after his comments in 1971 and then release his war records. Maybe all could've been forgiven. And I'm a Democrat."

Others within the group disagreed, of course. But most seemed to share this view. Note that the AP article on Kerry's speech mentions nothing about the reception by the veterans, which isn't a good sign. And the L.A. Times says he received a lukewarm response.

Ralph Peters, who's not exactly a friend of Bush, was even more harsh in his Post editorial. After ripping Kerry as "shameless" and calling his speech "disgraceful", Peters really gets angry:

Specific promises Kerry made were outright nonsense. He claimed he'd double the size of our special operations forces. Sounds great. But to do so would rob regular line units of critically needed, experienced NCOs and officers, fatally compromise the high standards of our special operators and take at least a decade — unless he means to ruin special ops entirely.

And Kerry's going to increase our ground forces by 40,000 troops. Good idea. But he's not going to send them to Iraq, you understand.

Having it both ways again.

Kerry said we should never go to war without a plan to win the peace. Agreed. But where was he 18 months ago, when such a criticism could have made a difference?

Back then, he was voting for the war. Before he opposed it. Before supporting it again. Now he's against it again. Although he supports our troops, of course.

Does Kerry have no shame at all? No spine, whatsoever? Is it possible to be nothing but a bundle of pure ambition, with no shred of ethics? Is Kerry so hungry for office that he'll change any position to buy a vote?

If President Bush shocks the Republican Convention tonight by coming out in favor of gay marriage, Kerry will immediately back a constitutional amendment to outlaw it.

Even on their worst day — and they've had some bad ones — the Bushies actually believe in a few things.

Kerry's the guy who, at the beginning of August, stated that we need to withdraw troops from Germany and South Korea. Then, as soon as President Bush announced a plan to do so, Kerry thundered against the idea. Confronted with his own remarks — made only two weeks earlier — he claimed that, well, yes, he thought we should withdraw troops, only not the way the president proposed to do it.

The guy is an eel in a vat of olive oil.

Yesterday, John Kerry tried to pander to America's heroes, conveniently forgetting that he'd trashed them for political gain, then shortchanged them throughout his Senate career. Suddenly, Kerry was the man who had fought for benefits for his fellow Vietnam vets, the man who felt their pain (Kerry makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity).

The only veterans' benefit young John Kerry fought for was the right of vets to be spit upon in public.

Yikes. I'm not sure what has Peters so aggravated. Maybe it's the statements Kerry made in his book The New Soldier back in 1971, the one with the upside-down flag on the cover, something we know he doesn't want publicized. Maybe he recalled this statement from that book:

We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans' Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the "greater glory of the United States." We will not accept the rhetoric. We will not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars - in fact, we will find it hard to join anything at all and when we do, we will demand relevancy such as other organizations have recently been unable to provide. We will not take solace from the creation of monuments or the naming of parks after a select few of the thousands of dead Americans and Vietnamese. We will not uphold traditions which decorously memorialize that which was base and grim.

The amazing thing about all this is that Kerry may anger veterans more than Bill Clinton did. But here's something curious we spotted in the text of The New Soldier...

I think that, more than anything, the New Soldier is trying to point out how there are two Americas -- the one the speeches are about and the one we really are. Rhetoric has blinded us so much that we are unable to see the realities which exist in this country.

Two Americas? Where have I heard that before?

(A tip o' the hat to Q and O, who covers much the same ground.)