More proof that the women's magazines are all in the tank for the Democrats arrives in the October issue of Vogue magazine (edited by major DNC donor Anna Wintour). After all the fashion ads comes a gooey story on Secretary of State John Kerry.
Writer Sally Hansen keeps bringing the reader back around to Kerry’s (very brief) service in Vietnam, reminding some of James Taranto’s 2004 gibe mocking Kerry’s milking of his war resume: “the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam.”
-- After a Normandy commemoration, "Kerry is pensive. He speaks of how terrifying the invasion must have been for the soldiers. I ask if he, as a former officer, could put himself in their shoes. He shakes his head. 'There was the possibility that we would be killed,' he says, referring to his tours [?] of duty in Vietnam, 'but it was more remote in that you didn’t know when you were going to be ambushed. You didn’t know when something was going to happen. In that situation'—D-day—'you know. You are watching boats blown up around you. It’s hell.'”
-- On Campaign 2004: "Many still consider Kerry’s loss to President George W. Bush an almost unfathomable debacle. The war in Iraq was proving disastrous at the time, and Kerry had the perfect presidential résumé: a Kennedy-like background, a record of courage in Vietnam, 20 years in the Senate. But some voters found him hard to connect to and perceived an aristocratic air that the Right mercilessly exploited. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smeared Kerry’s military record, Republicans branded him a flip-flopper on Iraq (a war he had voted for in 2002), and, in the end, Kerry lost the popular vote by 3 million."
-- After Kerry stays up late in Paris allowing Bostonians to take selfies with him, we read “I really do think some of it comes out of Vietnam,” says Wade about Kerry’s drive. “He came out of Vietnam with a pretty fundamental conviction that for whatever reasons a lot of his closest friends never came home, and he did. He has this conviction of not wasting time.”
-- “Most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence; they worry about what would happen in our absence,” Kerry told the graduating class at Yale this May, sounding like the idealistic young man who signed up to serve in Vietnam. In other ways, though, he remains the heartbroken veteran who turned against the war, too. “I think the president and I share a tremendous sense of the damage that was done by the prior administration’s approach—particularly to Iraq, and its inattention to Afghanistan,” he says to me during our interview at the State Department. America’s “wars of choice . . . never should have become what they were, and never should have taken place.”
Kerry also slammed Bush here:
I ask him if it’s painful to see the sectarian deterioration in Iraq. “Well, it makes me angry,” he says. “Painful is not the word I’d choose. We never should have turned it upside down. Having done so, they”—the Bush administration—“never put a political process together.”
Reminder to readers: as Hansen admitted in this article, Kerry voted FOR war in Iraq, and for funding it (before he was against it).
Hansen lined up the Kerry advisers to praise their advice target:
-- Kerry will seem to be everywhere at once, engaging in negotiations, jousting with his foreign counterparts, and struggling to pull off small victories before jumping back on his plane. “I don’t think there has ever been a Secretary of State who has thrown himself into the job with as much verve and conviction as this guy has,” says Strobe Talbott, a deputy Secretary of State under President Clinton and now the president of the Washington think tank the Brookings Institution as well as a Kerry adviser. “If he can’t get a workable and acceptable compromise on a dispute, it’s very hard to imagine anybody who can.”
-- “He has chosen to tackle head-on some difficult strategic issues,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national-security adviser, “and these issues would probably deteriorate into more dangerous prospects without some serious signs of U.S. interest.”
-- “He listens well,” says Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq, of Kerry’s diplomatic style. “He will listen to his interlocutors, understand their viewpoint, and make his points within the context of where they stand. That kind of empathy goes a long way to creating a climate in which compromise and agreement become possible. And he also has a reputation for absolute honesty and integrity. He never misleads, and he’s known for it.”
He NEVER misleads? Let's refer Vogue to Washington Post "fact checker" Glenn Kessler (a former State Department correspondent), who put Kerry in his "Biggest Pinocchios of 2013" for insisting at least twice he opposed war in Iraq.
Hansen does her best to say Kerry in the end was too serious for the White House: "It’s obvious that Kerry is more suited to the diplomatic life than he ever would have been to the modern presidency. He is far less extroverted and eager to please than most politicians—and he can’t fake a folksy, telegenic style. He has a solemn air of politeness, which seems to come from a sense of duty." (No doubt from VIETNAM!)
Hansen throws in one skeptic -- Harvard's Stephen Walt, who just complains that Kerry and Madeleine Albright are wrong to think the United States is "indispensable" in the world.
As for Taranto's "French-looking" wisecrack, it referred to Kerry's French roots (and aristocratic air), which is where Sally Hansen began her gooey article:
Back in June, Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to the tiny French village of Saint-Briac-sur-Mer to do something he never could have done while running for president—celebrate his European roots. Kerry’s mother, a descendant of the Forbes shipping family, grew up here on an estate called Les Essarts, which was destroyed by the Nazis and then rebuilt as an enormous blue-shuttered château the family still owns today. “Johnnie,” as one of his cousins, the town’s former mayor, calls him, spent his boyhood summers in this idyllic, immaculate place: all stone buildings, cobbled streets, épiceries with bright awnings, and women in Jean Seberg striped jerseys outside the Bar Tabac de la Poste.
Perhaps the worst snippet is this one.
“I don’t think there’s anything harder in this life,” apart from matters of life and death, “than losing a presidential election,” says his friend former Yale classmate and State Department adviser David Thorne. “It requires determination and toughness to get back up on the horse.”
This would suggest Kerry has never dealt with a disabled veteran whose lost limbs or eyesight, someone who's survived a deadly disease, or a major terrorist attack. Seriously, losing an election is as traumatic as any of this?
