Kerry's Undeclared War

[Nbadan]

Kerry's Undeclared War

By MATT BAI, New York Times
Published: October 10, 2004

s New York and Washington were under attack on Sept. 11, 2001, a film crew happened to come upon John Kerry leaving the Capitol. The brief moment of footage, included in a BBC do entary called ''Clear the Skies,'' tells us something, perhaps, about Kerry in a crisis. The camera captures Congressional aides and visitors, clearly distraught and holding onto one another, streaming down the back steps of the Capitol building in near panic, following the bellowed instructions of anxious police. Off to one side of the screen, there is Kerry, alone, his long legs carrying him calmly down the steps, his neck craning toward the sky, as if he were watching a gathering rainstorm. His face and demeanor appear unworried. Kerry could be a man lost in his thoughts who just happens to have wandered onto the set of a disaster film.

''I remember looking up at the sky as I walked down the steps,'' Kerry told me recently, when I asked him about the film clip. He said that he and other members of the Senate's Democratic leadership had just watched on television as the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and shortly after that they heard the sonic boom of an explosion and saw, through a large window, the black smoke rise from the Pentagon. ''We'd had some warning that there was some airplane in the sky. And I remember seeing a great big plane -- I think it was a 747 or something -- up there, but it wasn't moving in a way that, you know, I was particularly concerned. I remember feeling a rage, a huge anger, and I remember turning to somebody and saying, 'This is war.' I said, 'This is an act of war.'''

After leaving the Capitol on that terrible day, Kerry walked across the street to his office in the Russell Senate building, where he made sure that his staff had been evacuated and was safe. Reluctant to leave Capitol Hill, he watched TV coverage in his office and saw the second tower fall. He called his older daughter, Alexandra, who was living in New York, and his wife, Teresa, who was in Washington. Those who saw Kerry that morning recall mainly that he was furious, an emotion, those close to him say, that comes easily to him in times of trial. He thought it was a mistake to shut down the Capitol, to show terrorists that they had the power to send the United States government into hiding.

''You know, my instinct was, Where's my gun?'' Kerry told me. ''How do you fight back? I wanted to do something.'' That evening, sitting at home, he called an aide and said he wanted to go to New York that very night to help the rescuers; he was ultimately convinced that such a trip was logistically impossible. In the days ahead, Kerry would make two trips to ground zero to see what remained of the carnage.


With the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the geopolitical currents that Washington had spent half a century mastering shifted all at once. It isn't clear how long it took Kerry -- a senator for nearly 20 years and, in September 2001, an undeclared candidate for the presidency -- to understand the political magnitude of that change. George W. Bush and his advisers got it almost instantly. Few men get to be president, and far fewer get to be president at a critical, transformative moment; Bush, seizing the opportunity, recast himself as the accidental protagonist of a new and dramatic national narrative. Less than a year removed from a disputed election, he set about elbowing his way into the small pantheon of modern presidents -- F.D.R. after Pearl Harbor, Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis -- who led the nation in profound moments of peril.

Before the smoke had even dissipated over Manhattan, Bush presented the country with an ambitious, overarching construct for a new era in foreign relations. ''The war on terror,'' as he put it, was this generation's test of military and ideological resolve, different from the ones that came before with regard to tactics, perhaps, but not in the magnitude of the challenges or the ambition of the enemy. Bush explained that Al Qaeda and its allies and imitators would cons ute a new kind of menace in the years ahead, stealthier and less predictable than past enemies. And yet, in their opposition to American principles and the threat they posed to the nation, he suggested, the Islamic terrorists were the equivalent of Hitler and Stalin, and defeating them would require the same steel and the same conviction that guided America in the last century's campaigns.

Very interesting, but long article on Kerry continued here.

[Marcus Bryant]

Here's another interesting long article on Kerry

August 19, 2004
Our Balanced Media, Redux: WaPo Reporterette Fellates John Forbes Kerry in Print

Aaron Burr is back again, and demands that I READ IT ALL. So I guess I should READ IT ALL, and maybe you should, too.

This is a reprint of an old WaPo article, from June 1, 2003. It sort of lets you know -- just sort of -- whose side the WaPo is on.

In a way, I appreciate this style of "journalism" better than the what we usually see. At least here the clearly-smitten and moist Ms. Blumenfeld isn't too coy or cute about her allegiances or biases. She's as subtle as shotgun blast.

Just for fun, I have bolded Ms. Blumenfeld's frequent mentions of Mr. Kerry's "nuance," "intellect," and/or "complexity." Mentions of how butch and manly and sexy and tough-guy he is are in bolded italics.

This is a hard article to get through. It reads like a very long entry in a teenager's Crush Diary. But on to the fellatio:


The Washington Post

June 1, 2003 Sunday
Final Edition

SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A01

LENGTH: 2640 words

HEADLINE: Hunter, Dreamer, Realist;
Complexity Infuses Senator's Ambition

BYLINE: Laura Blumenfeld, Washington Post Staff Writer

BODY:

John Kerry eats dove. Even better, he shoots them. From behind the
stalks of a Southern cornfield, he'll watch them flutter and dart, and fire.

"You clean them. Let them hang. It takes three or four birds to have
a meal," said the Massachusetts senator. "You might eat it at a picnic,
cold roasted. I love dove."

Dove, quail, duck, deer. Kerry described how to hunt and gut them, talking as he sliced through a steak at midnight after campaigning all day
in Iowa for the Democratic presidential nomination. Carve out the heart, he said over dinner, pull out the entrails and cut up the meat. Bad table
manners, perhaps, or good politics. After Sept. 11, 2001, some Democrats argue, they can't take the White House if they sound like doves.

That is not a problem for the dove hunter. Kerry, 59, is the only combat veteran in the field. He stands 6-foot-4. He rides a Harley, plays ice hockey, snowboards, windsurfs, kitesurfs, and has such thick, aggressive hair he uses a brush with metal teeth.

[he also has to strap his massive down to his leg to keep it from randomly assaulting foreigners in the street-- his will brook no nonsense from swarthy foreign-types. -- ed.]

"That's our slogan," quipped his ad man, Jim Margolis. "John Kerry: He's no weenie."

"He doesn't need a consultant to tell him how to dress like an alpha male," said his friend Ivan Schlager. "He is a damn alpha male."

[okay, now I'm starting to get aroused myself.]

[SpursWoman]

@ MB