Old Habits Are Hard To Break

Hugh Hewitt writes in on the Weekly Standard’s page today about John Kerry’s illegal, self-appointed “peace” mission to the Sandanistas in early 1985. Tell me if this doesn’t sound an awful lot like his forays to Paris to pow-wow with the North Vietnamese fourteen years earlier:

On the eve of a major Senate vote on the issue of [Contra] aid, John Kerry and Tom Harkin jetted off to Managua for a weekend of intensive talks with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. The pair departed after holding a press conference to announce a study which listed dozens of supposed lies that the Reagan Administration had told Congress and 15 allegations of law breaking (the study was done by the hard-left Institute for Policy Studies). Kerry and Harkin returned with a three page ‘peace proposal’ given to them by Ortega.

Then-Secretary of State George Shultz was outraged. ‘It's presumably not lawful for citizens to appoint themselves as negotiators for the United States,’ Shultz declared. ‘Members of Congress have every right to travel to Nicaragua to review the situation, but we cannot have a successful policy when they take trips or write 'Dear Commandante' letters with the aim of negotiating as self-appointed emissaries to the communist regime.’ Shultz called for the censure of the two senators. Charles Krauthammer, writing at the time, accurately observed that ‘[a]t their arrival home, only the umbrella was missing.’ Senator Richard Lugar remarked that ‘[m]ost Republicans were absolutely enraged with the Kerry-Harkin mission. That was absolutely the last straw.’ The Los Angeles Times reported anger among moderate Democrats as well, who ‘complained privately that the Harkin-Kerry trip made their party look pro-Sandinista.’

“But Kerry got exactly what he wanted from the trip: A front page profile in the Style section of the Washington Post days after his return.”

What were those phrases Zell Miller used? “More wrong, more often, more weak, more wobbly.”

Or my preferred expression: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”