According to the Boston Globe, “Senator John F. Kerry said [20 December] that President Bashar Assad of Syria expressed a willingness to work with the United States to bring stability to Iraq, and said Assad personally offered assistance that Kerry plans to convey to the Bush administration.” Can this guy ever understand that, particularly with his record of consorting (or is that cavorting) with the enemy, his word is worth about as much as a cuspidor of warm spit?
He apparently didn’t notice what Assad pulled on the Reverend Rick Warren recently, when he duped the California preacher (in Syria with cameras in tow, naturally) into making statements (or not making them, depending on one’s take) about things Syrian. This played well in the Middle East press, but was bad for this country. There may be folks out there who think Warren, a fantastic church-builder, has bona fides in areas international. There may be folks out there who think Kerry (and his sidekick on the trip, Connecticut Senator Dodd) speak for this country. They don’t, and their gallivanting among the enemies of both civility and this country makes them appear as ridiculous as the Keystone Kops in full chase-mode while stumbling over each other.
Both these guys are said to be president wannabes though neither has a ghost of a chance – not saying much since their main opposition (at least according to the mainstream media) comes from Queen Hillary and a media-project in progress, Senator Obama – and maybe figure that one of them can parlay this exotic “diplomatic breakthrough” with Assad, errand-boy for Iranian President Ahmadinejad, into something spectacular enough to make folks forget their considerable political baggage.
Kerry, it might be remembered, tossed his medals or ribbons from his Purple-Heart-laden Vietnam activity (maybe one-half day of duty lost in total as the result of wounds three times in four months) over some fence in Washington back in 1970-71. While still an officer in the Naval Reserve, he met with North Vietnamese apparatchiks in France (a legal no-no) back in those wild days of protest, then testified before Senator Fulbright’s Committee about the terrible atrocities visited by the Americans upon the Vietnamese populace. Kerry’s exact words in 1971: “So what I am saying is that yes, there will be some recrimination but far, far less than the 200,000 a year who are murdered by the United States of America …”.
Further according to the Boston Globe, “Kerry said his meeting gave him and Dodd a chance to express the ‘unanimity of Democrats’ about the need for an independent Lebanon, free of Syrian interference. In a joint statement, the senators said they laid out a series of steps the Assad government must take to improve its standing in the eyes of the United States.” Imagine that! Interpreted, Kerry meant that the elections gave him (as party leader, at least in his own light as a presidential contender in 2004) the power to set policy, now that the democrats have a one-vote majority in the Senate…aided and abetted, of course, by Dodd, perhaps the stalking horse.
What these guys actually did was show Assad and Ahmadinejad and the other Middle East power-brokers that this nation is bereft of resolve, when actually it isn’t. They consciously made an effort to undermine President Bush, and the notion that they “laid out a series of steps the Assad government must take to improve its standing in the eyes of the United States” is so foolish as to make one wonder what they were drinking. Assad probably nodded his head like a good sixth-grader should, had his secretary of state (or whatever passes for that spot in Syria) note all the “steps,” and then joined him in gales of laughter when the honorable senators had gone on their way.
It’s amazing what can happen after an election, especially when the wannabes are out in full force establishing their bona fides and whipping the big givers into a state of financial frenzy. If Kerry announces, his candidacy will be DOA when he drags his family before the cameras at the witching hour of oratorical solemnity to say the nation needs him. His recent remark about the troops being ignorant so-and-so’s sealed his doom, although he already has enough baggage to weight him down irretrievably. Maybe Dodd can come to the rescue and save the nation with his own candidacy.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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