Psychotic Insecurity
Jesus, haven’t Kerry and his people ever heard the expression, “When it rains, it pours”? Or its corollary, “Never bluff when your inside straight becomes a seven-high”?
Now Doug Brinkley, John Kerry’s biographer, is claiming that the Boston Balker was in Cambodia not once, but three or four times in January and February of '69 on clandestine missions, dropping off Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and CIA spooks on all manner of secret missions. As fallacious boasting goes this is devolving to junior high school/playground level.
Hugh Hewitt quotes an associate in the intelligence business who says Kerry's story seems more than a little odd to him:
Does this mean Kerry is lying? Let’s not answer that just yet.
Back in the spring the matter surfaced of Kerry’s involvement with an assassination plot against six pro-Vietnam war senators hatched by his group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Kerry’s story has always been that he quit the group before this plot was devised. Yet half a dozen eyewitnesses, including people working on his campaign, stated that he was at that meeting, as did subsequently released FBI documentation. Only then did Mr. French backtrack, claiming to have had (does this sound familiar?) a “memory lapse” about another of his formative life events that he had said was “seared” into his memory. But given that said eyewitnesses also said that Kerry argued vigorously against the assassination plot at said meeting, why would he have been so insistent that he wasn’t there?
It isn’t just his overrated “war heroism” that he embellishes, either.
Kerry tried to pass himself off to a Flint Journal outdoor writer as a dedicated deer hunter:
The columnist, David V. Graham, proceeded to set forth in detail Kerry’s rabidly anti-hunting and anti-gun voting record in the U.S. Senate. Concluded Mr. Graham:
Hunting is just one aspect of the senator’s seeming compulsion to get in touch with his inner-Joe Sixpack. Kerry does other – well, what he thinks is "regular guy" stuff, like pheasant-shooting, speed-boating (on a $200,000 cig boat), cycling (on a $2,500 racing bike), motocross (on a $10,000 motorcycle), and wind or kite surfing. But always and especially when the cameras are running (except when he falls on his face, of course, which he officially NEVER DOES). Would he be “living the active high life” if he weren’t running for president? Maybe somebody should ask Teraaaaaaaayza if he’s taking Viagra or Cialis or Enzite, or all three. Because after all, even on the campaign trail the “right moment” can suddenly appear when you least expect it.
Wind-surfing was what Kerry planned to do on Saturday in Oregon on the Columbia River Gorge. But low winds and a vacation schedule in Idaho threw those plans off. No problem, right? And sure enough, Kerry declared his intention to return to Oregon on Monday to get in his windsurfing expedition.But he just couldn’t leave his artificial “everyman of action” persona alone. He had to embellish it.
In response to the not unreasonable point that not everybody can just buzz back and forth between an Idaho ski chalet and an el primo windsurfing locale, Kerry told reporters on the plane that, yes, any shlub could and would pay the $250 air fare to do precisely that. Of course, John Q. Public wouldn’t be jetting there and back on a 757 charter costing around fifty grand, not counting the publicly-funded expenses for Secret Service protection and USFS preparations. Belatedly realizing how, well, out of touch that sounded, instead of just shutting up, Kerry compounded the gaffe by blurting, "Look, the guys who do this [i.e., windsurf or hunt pheasant] are local guys, like plumbers, construction workers."
His aides eased in around Kerry like the friends of a roaring drunk who has barfed in the punchbowl, fallen down the stairs, and crapped his pants. No cameras were running (Imagine my chagrin…), but print reporters were taking notes from the on-the-record conversation. And even as friendly as they are to his candidacy, they must have been curling their toes at this manifestation of the “real Kerry.”
"With this kind of stuff, we're in a no win situation," said one of the Kerry staffers to the American Spectator. "Every candidate, especially a Democrat, feels the need to pass the 'guy' test. We have him throw a football around, or play softball. The hitch with our guy is that he likes to do stuff that most blue collar guys just don't do. He really thinks windsurfing is a regular Joe kind of thing. He thinks pheasant hunting is a regular joe kind of thing. Cheney pheasant hunts with Supreme Court justices who are considering a case involving him -- is that what 'normal' people do?"
No, not really. Just as “normal people” don’t fabricate wholesale “alternative” biographies that sound so much better and more interesting than their actual lives.
“With rueful admiration, former Senator and Navy Seal Bob Kerrey called the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, ‘an exceptionally good liar.’ Unfortunately Senator John Kerry is an exceptionally bad liar,” writes the Spectator’s Thomas Lipscomb.
This isn’t just a question of Kerry’s dishonesty. Bill Clinton lied all the time, but it was the very ubiquity of his mendacity that enabled him to get away with it. Since everything he said was a fib, or at best a half-truth, the public got overrun by it until it just became background static, and once Clinton was penned in by a GOP Congress, most people felt like it didn’t matter all that much. For Lurch, making up or exaggerating stories about himself seems to be a compulsion designed to prop up his own self-esteem and protect him from having to take political heat for mistakes and failures. Call it Eddie Haskell syndrome – a calculating pathology devoted toward an end in which the subject has an intense emotional stake, thus rendering him all but incapable of abandoning it even when it’s falling apart all around him.
The implications of this mental irregularity for a Kerry presidency are profoundly disturbing. Take the obvious example of his boast that he’ll get our only REAL, TRUE allies, France and Germany, to cough up a hundred thousand troops to take our place in Iraq. In the real world there’s less chance of that happening than Michael Moore winning the gold medal in Athens in the pole vault. But in John Kerry’s mind it’s tantalizingly doable – but ONLY by him. And once in office, when he failed to bring it about, he’d just make believe that success was just one more summit, one more communiqué, one more concession away, and in the mean time he’d begin evacuating US forces from Iraq, which he couldn’t avoid doing at that point even if he did have second thoughts, with all the implications therein for a de facto al Qaeda/Iranian takeover.
John Kerry would never admit error, and actively deny reality when his whiz-bang “solutions” collapsed like Michael Moore’s bunk beds. He would “mislead” the nation into foreign policy calamity by first misleading himself that his pacifism would be any more successful than Jimmy Carter’s before it.
Put another way, Bill Clinton’s dishonesty was grounded in narcissism. John Kerry’s is grounded in insecurity – so much so that I doubt he could bring himself to give his equivalent of a “malaise” speech even in the midst of the ocean of malaise that a Kerry presidency would be all but certain to precipitate.
Hard to see much “hope” in any of that.
Now Doug Brinkley, John Kerry’s biographer, is claiming that the Boston Balker was in Cambodia not once, but three or four times in January and February of '69 on clandestine missions, dropping off Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and CIA spooks on all manner of secret missions. As fallacious boasting goes this is devolving to junior high school/playground level.
Hugh Hewitt quotes an associate in the intelligence business who says Kerry's story seems more than a little odd to him:
Let me make a couple observations:
1) The CIA has its own budget for things like getting people where they ‘shouldn't’ be. They wouldn't need to use the Navy, and most particularly some random Lieutenant, to get an agent into Cambodia. Honestly. Talk about unwanted attention. If they absolutely had to use the river (which is just straight-up stupid, from a tactical standpoint,) the CIA would have used a local, who had his own boat, and thus could conceivably survive a chance encounter with border authorities.
2) If Kerry had an agent on his boat, there is no way on this earth he would have mentioned, casually or otherwise, that he was with the CIA. Especially not to a mere Lieutenant. That's like the cardinal sin of the Clandestine Service. Even if the person knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who you are (which Kerry would not have), you still don't talk about it.
3) As I think you've already noted, in one way or another, the magic hat may sound cool, but let's be serious. What possible conversation could have come up to result in the gift of the man's hat? And what kind of idiot gives his boonie cap away right before diving into the bush for an extended period of time?
4) Finally, I would like to expand on my statement that the river is the worst possible choice to get into the country. Rivers are important things, when it comes to borders. They are, generally speaking, treated just like a road between two nations. Which means, especially with a bloody civil war going on next door, Cambodia would have almost certainly had permanent checkpoints established on trans-boundary waterways. This is expressly because a waterway is a primary route of travel. Even if there were not any sort of checkpoints established on the Mekong, there would be a higher frequency of regular border patrols in the area. A CIA agent, who by nature doesn't want to announce his presence to authorities, is going to take the least conspicuous route of ingress possible. Which means not the river.
Does this mean Kerry is lying? Let’s not answer that just yet.
Back in the spring the matter surfaced of Kerry’s involvement with an assassination plot against six pro-Vietnam war senators hatched by his group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Kerry’s story has always been that he quit the group before this plot was devised. Yet half a dozen eyewitnesses, including people working on his campaign, stated that he was at that meeting, as did subsequently released FBI documentation. Only then did Mr. French backtrack, claiming to have had (does this sound familiar?) a “memory lapse” about another of his formative life events that he had said was “seared” into his memory. But given that said eyewitnesses also said that Kerry argued vigorously against the assassination plot at said meeting, why would he have been so insistent that he wasn’t there?
It isn’t just his overrated “war heroism” that he embellishes, either.
Kerry tried to pass himself off to a Flint Journal outdoor writer as a dedicated deer hunter:
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry appears to be trying just a little too hard to appeal to the gun owners and sportsmen of America in his quest for votes. Last week, Kerry was quoted in news accounts as telling one gathering in the Midwest that he particularly likes deer hunting. He then proceeded to tell the group that he likes taking his ‘trusty 12-gauge double barrel and crawling around’ on his belly to stalk deer. He said he is particularly happy when he can use the wind to outwit a deer.
I'm sure I'm not the only guy who was astounded at these remarks.
I'm also sure there must be a hunter or two somewhere in America who uses a double barrel to hunt deer, but I don't know anyone who crawls around to do it. Crawling around - except in very special circumstances - is a good way to hurt yourself. For another thing, anyone who has spent more than a minute or two deer hunting knows that most hunters use rifles for deer hunting. Even those who hunt in areas where rifles are prohibited would be reluctant to use a double barrel, since pumps and semi-automatics are much better for deer hunting, especially when they are equipped with rifle sights and slug barrels.
The columnist, David V. Graham, proceeded to set forth in detail Kerry’s rabidly anti-hunting and anti-gun voting record in the U.S. Senate. Concluded Mr. Graham:
Hunters, like most people, want their political candidates to be sincere about their beliefs and their positions. Most hunters are better than most at recognizing a phony when they see one.
Hunting is just one aspect of the senator’s seeming compulsion to get in touch with his inner-Joe Sixpack. Kerry does other – well, what he thinks is "regular guy" stuff, like pheasant-shooting, speed-boating (on a $200,000 cig boat), cycling (on a $2,500 racing bike), motocross (on a $10,000 motorcycle), and wind or kite surfing. But always and especially when the cameras are running (except when he falls on his face, of course, which he officially NEVER DOES). Would he be “living the active high life” if he weren’t running for president? Maybe somebody should ask Teraaaaaaaayza if he’s taking Viagra or Cialis or Enzite, or all three. Because after all, even on the campaign trail the “right moment” can suddenly appear when you least expect it.
Wind-surfing was what Kerry planned to do on Saturday in Oregon on the Columbia River Gorge. But low winds and a vacation schedule in Idaho threw those plans off. No problem, right? And sure enough, Kerry declared his intention to return to Oregon on Monday to get in his windsurfing expedition.But he just couldn’t leave his artificial “everyman of action” persona alone. He had to embellish it.
In response to the not unreasonable point that not everybody can just buzz back and forth between an Idaho ski chalet and an el primo windsurfing locale, Kerry told reporters on the plane that, yes, any shlub could and would pay the $250 air fare to do precisely that. Of course, John Q. Public wouldn’t be jetting there and back on a 757 charter costing around fifty grand, not counting the publicly-funded expenses for Secret Service protection and USFS preparations. Belatedly realizing how, well, out of touch that sounded, instead of just shutting up, Kerry compounded the gaffe by blurting, "Look, the guys who do this [i.e., windsurf or hunt pheasant] are local guys, like plumbers, construction workers."
His aides eased in around Kerry like the friends of a roaring drunk who has barfed in the punchbowl, fallen down the stairs, and crapped his pants. No cameras were running (Imagine my chagrin…), but print reporters were taking notes from the on-the-record conversation. And even as friendly as they are to his candidacy, they must have been curling their toes at this manifestation of the “real Kerry.”
"With this kind of stuff, we're in a no win situation," said one of the Kerry staffers to the American Spectator. "Every candidate, especially a Democrat, feels the need to pass the 'guy' test. We have him throw a football around, or play softball. The hitch with our guy is that he likes to do stuff that most blue collar guys just don't do. He really thinks windsurfing is a regular Joe kind of thing. He thinks pheasant hunting is a regular joe kind of thing. Cheney pheasant hunts with Supreme Court justices who are considering a case involving him -- is that what 'normal' people do?"
No, not really. Just as “normal people” don’t fabricate wholesale “alternative” biographies that sound so much better and more interesting than their actual lives.
“With rueful admiration, former Senator and Navy Seal Bob Kerrey called the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, ‘an exceptionally good liar.’ Unfortunately Senator John Kerry is an exceptionally bad liar,” writes the Spectator’s Thomas Lipscomb.
Selective memory is everyone's secret enemy. Kerry hadn't been challenged in his selective recall since he left Vietnam, and his stories kept getting better and better. No wonder Kerry told the Washington Post interviewer, ‘I wish they had a delete button on LexisNexis.’
But what is now clear is that Kerry has gone a step farther. Kerry lies. He not only lies to the Senate, the press and historians, he lies to his own press people, and he lies to himself. And he has been lying for years. And whenever one of Kerry's lies is under attack, he attacks every one else - as liars.
And there is a pattern to his responses as well. When the lie becomes undeniable, the sources are attacked. In the case of the VVAW plot, John Hurley, head of Veterans for Kerry and a former VVAW member himself, pressured eyewitnesses, like totally disabled vet John Musgrave, to change their story. In the case of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, there has been a direct attack by lawyers for the campaign trying to silence their advertising as containing ‘outrageous lies.’ And yet no specific lie is ever charged. Nor does Kerry ever take the chance of actually bringing charges against his accusers for libel which would open the issue to a courtroom trial of the truth.
When the lie becomes unsustainable, it is attributed to a memory failure. Kerry never appears. He never tries to make an explanation. He takes no responsibility. He even hides from the press as he has for the past several days.
This isn’t just a question of Kerry’s dishonesty. Bill Clinton lied all the time, but it was the very ubiquity of his mendacity that enabled him to get away with it. Since everything he said was a fib, or at best a half-truth, the public got overrun by it until it just became background static, and once Clinton was penned in by a GOP Congress, most people felt like it didn’t matter all that much. For Lurch, making up or exaggerating stories about himself seems to be a compulsion designed to prop up his own self-esteem and protect him from having to take political heat for mistakes and failures. Call it Eddie Haskell syndrome – a calculating pathology devoted toward an end in which the subject has an intense emotional stake, thus rendering him all but incapable of abandoning it even when it’s falling apart all around him.
The implications of this mental irregularity for a Kerry presidency are profoundly disturbing. Take the obvious example of his boast that he’ll get our only REAL, TRUE allies, France and Germany, to cough up a hundred thousand troops to take our place in Iraq. In the real world there’s less chance of that happening than Michael Moore winning the gold medal in Athens in the pole vault. But in John Kerry’s mind it’s tantalizingly doable – but ONLY by him. And once in office, when he failed to bring it about, he’d just make believe that success was just one more summit, one more communiqué, one more concession away, and in the mean time he’d begin evacuating US forces from Iraq, which he couldn’t avoid doing at that point even if he did have second thoughts, with all the implications therein for a de facto al Qaeda/Iranian takeover.
John Kerry would never admit error, and actively deny reality when his whiz-bang “solutions” collapsed like Michael Moore’s bunk beds. He would “mislead” the nation into foreign policy calamity by first misleading himself that his pacifism would be any more successful than Jimmy Carter’s before it.
Put another way, Bill Clinton’s dishonesty was grounded in narcissism. John Kerry’s is grounded in insecurity – so much so that I doubt he could bring himself to give his equivalent of a “malaise” speech even in the midst of the ocean of malaise that a Kerry presidency would be all but certain to precipitate.
Hard to see much “hope” in any of that.
posted by JASmius at 3:03 PM
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