So let’s get down to brass tacks on John Kerry, the nominee for Secretary of State. He’s a dope & there isn’t a whole lot more to say about him. Except that he’s a filthy rich & foxy dope, as well as an opportunist & a social climber. His most noted achievement was opposing the Vietnam War & joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in 1970 though his membership only lasted a few months. He refused to speak at the VVAW Winter Soldier Hearings in January 1971, where veterans & soldiers spoke out against the war describing their experiences & the atrocities they witnessed. But he did appear at splashy Senate hearings in April 1971 & was all over the media like Meet the Press & late night TV. As a participant of the antiwar movement at that time, let me assure you it was highly irregular for antiwar activists to get news time for a mass rally, let alone prime time personal interviews. Believe me, it wasn’t his charisma! It was connections.
He did a proud job with a series of Senate hearings in the late 1980s investigating involvement of the US Government in drug trafficking. But it would be interesting to know how much of that work was actually done by him since it was more likely done by his staff. But okay, he’s got a couple of good things under his belt.
He’s not so much a flip-flopper as a bullshit artist, pretending he’s against war to one audience but boasting of voting for fat defense budgets to another group. No matter how many impressive posts he’s had in the US Senate, he’s an ineffectual man so as to offend no one & curry favor with all--though, to be fair, he’s not more or less ineffectual or sycophantic than most of the US Congress.
He’s imperious & patrician in manner & that class arrogance was fully evident when in 1992, he made a speech at Yale University against affirmative action (which the Boston Globe published in full). The speech was putrid & racist, betraying the most appalling regard for the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. It was shocking to read his arrogant tirade about the “culture of dependency” in the Black community & his suggestion that affirmative action was responsible, that “social disintegration is the result of a massive shift in the psychology of our nation that some argue grew out of the excesses of the 1960s, a shift from self-reliance to indulgence & dependence, from caring to self-indulgence, from public accountability to public abdication and chaos." This rubbish from a man who petitioned the city of Boston to relocate a fire hydrant in front of his mansion because it was an eyesore!
Of course, I took personal umbrage because as a recipient of affirmative action I was hired into a high-paying job with benefits I could not otherwise have hoped to get in ‘female work’. Along with me were dozens of Black workers, all of us so poor we didn’t have our own cars yet & had to bus back & forth to work. Shortly after the Yale speech, he appeared at a women’s rights rally in Boston & passed by me as he left. My adrenalin shot up & I shouted at him, “Senator Kerry, your speech at Yale was shameful.” With all the hauteur of his class & the manner of a man dismissing a servant, he said to me, “What is it I said?” And without waiting for my response, he turned around & walked away.
Expect nothing from this creep. Because even nothing is beyond his capabilities.
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