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Today's
Stories
Febrauary 10, 2004
Elizabeth Schulte
The Many Faces of John Kerry
February
9, 2004
Michael
Donnelly
Will Skull and Bones Really Change CEOs?
Inside John Kerry's Closet
Chris
Floyd
Smells Like Team Spirit: the Bush B-Boys
Replay Their Greatest Hits
Bill
Christison
What's Wrong with the CIA?
Dr. Susan
Block
Janet Jackson's Mammary Moment: Boob Tube
Super Bowl
February
7/8, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
Offending Valerie: Dealing with Jewish
Self-Absorption
Jeff Ballinger
No Sweat Shopping
Dave
Lindorff
Spray and Pray in Iraq: a Marine in
Transit
Alexander
Cockburn
McNamara: the Sequel
February
6, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Are the Kurds in the Way?
Joanne
Mariner
Anita Bryant's Legacy
Saul
Landau
Happiness and Botox
Kurt Nimmo
Horror Non-fiction: A How-To Guide from
Perle and Frum
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Real Intelligence Failure: Our
Own
February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Jordan
Green
Democratic Patronage in Northern New
Mexico
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan
Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10, Morris
0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's Revelations
and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the Mafia
|
February
10, 2004
They'll Never Call Him a Radical (or
Even an Alternative)
The
Many Faces of John Kerry
By ELIZABETH
SCHULTE
"A
man defined by inner conflicts."
That’s
how the Boston Globe described John Kerry in a five-part series in June
2003. "The gung-ho Vietnam hero turned articulate antiwar protester;
the shaggy-haired liberal rebel turned feisty prosecutor; a politician
whose core beliefs included a skeptical view of government," wrote
the Globe.
Sounds
familiar? Someone wrote a book about it in the 1800s--it’s called
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. During his 19 years as a career politician
and Washington insider, Kerry has never let a little thing like principle
get in his way. He’s made a career out of balancing between the
Democratic Party’s conservative and the liberal wings.
That’s
why, last week in Greenville, S.C., Kerry declared that he was going
to "hold Bush accountable" for the war in Iraq. But just as
easily, he could boast to his Republican critics, "I have voted
for the largest defense budgets in the history of our country."
Kerry
has taken several liberal positions during his career, only to take
them back years later. Since 1984, when he won his first campaign for
a U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts, Kerry backed canceling weapons
systems, such as the B-1 bomber, B-2 stealth bomber, the Apache helicopter
and the Patriot missile. Kerry now calls those positions "ill-advised,
and I think some of them are stupid in the context of the world we find
ourselves in right now, and the things that I’ve learned since
then."
In
the 1980s, Kerry harshly criticized Ronald Reagan’s order to invade
the tiny island nation of Grenada in 1983. Today, he says: "I was
dismissive of the majesty of the invasion of Grenada. But I basically
was supportive. I never publicly opposed it."
Kerry
voted against the congressional resolution authorizing military force
in Iraq in 1990. But after Washington’s quick victory, Kerry did
a quick turnaround and became a supporter of the war. Kerry’s
own office could hardly keep up with the changes.
At
one point, it mailed out letters to constituents that voiced both positions.
Likewise, in October 2002, Kerry voted to give congressional authorization
for Bush’s invasion of Iraq, only to criticize the war afterward.
To
listen to Kerry criticize the civil liberties-shredding USA PATRIOT
Act today, you’d never know that he voted for the legislation
in 2001. "We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock
in the night," Kerry says today. "So it is time to end the
era of John Ashcroft."
During
his 19-year career in the Senate, Kerry has also taken positions that
are far from liberal. In 1992, he warned an audience at his alma mater,
Yale University, about a "culture of dependency...We must ask whether
[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 and dependence, from caring
to self-indulgence, from public accountability to public abdication
and chaos."
"The
truth is that affirmative action has kept America thinking in racial
terms," he said. Kerry’s position was in line with the one
that Bill Clinton was peddling with his call for "personal responsibility."
Kerry
also supported Clinton’s welfare "reform," which tossed
millions of poor people off the welfare rolls, or forced them into low-wage
jobs. And Kerry can also take credit for helping to push through Clinton’s
1994 crime bill, which expanded the federal death penalty and included
money to put 100,000 more cops on the street.
In
1994, Kerry took his conservative rhetoric up a notch after the Republican
victory in congressional elections--arguing that Democrats were being
punished for suggesting too-liberal policies, like universal health
care.
Kerry
also has a bad habit of bending the truth to play up his liberal credentials.
During his 1984 campaign, he proudly described in campaign literature
how he "joined the struggle for voting rights in the South,"
leaving the impression that he’d actually gone to the South. In
reality, however, his work registering Black voters in Mississippi never
went beyond the Yale campus.
When
he needs to appeal to an antiwar audience, Kerry will pull out his history
as a Vietnam War veteran who came home to oppose the war. After serving
two tours in Vietnam, Kerry did become a member of Vietnam Veterans
Against the War (VVAW). But he was by no means a radical.
Kerry
refused to speak at the VVAW’s January 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation,
a series of hearings in Detroit in which soldiers spoke out against
the atrocities that they witnessed in Vietnam. But he did agree to appear
at a well-publicized Senate committee hearing--and put himself at the
head of a demonstration organized later that year in Washington, D.C.
During
the protest, veterans tossed their medals at the White House. Kerry
kept his medals--but tossed his ribbons and medals that other soldiers
had given him.
Only
a few months after grabbing the spotlight, he left the organization.
"I resigned and left [the VVAW] because the agenda of some of the
folks within the veterans’ movement ultimately became confused
and went way beyond just trying to end the war," said in an interview
with the Boston Phoenix. "There was a lot of rhetoric about every
social ill and evil there was." As his "yes" vote last
year on Bush’s Iraq war shows, Kerry has moved "way beyond"
any antiwar past that he might have had.
This
man is no alternative
"I’VE
GOT news for the HMOs and the big drug companies and the big oil companies
and influence peddlers," Kerry declared in a speech last week in
St. Louis. "We’re coming and you’re going. And don’t
let the door hit you on the way out!" But if anyone knows where
the influence is peddled, it’s John Kerry.
While
his patrician family’s wealth had largely faded by the time that
John was a teenager, they did "scrape up" enough to send the
boy to a series of Swiss and New England boarding schools. That was
followed by his father’s alma mater, Yale, where he was a member
of the same elite Skull and Bones society that George Bush was.
He
counted among his close friends Fred Smith, who would later found Federal
Express, and Richard Pershing, the grandson of the famous First World
War general. He dated Jacqueline Kennedy’s half-sister, Janet
Auchincloss, and once hobnobbed with JFK sailing on Narragansett Bay.
Today,
Kerry--the richest member of Congress--is worth an estimated $550 million,
according to Forbes magazine. This is due in large part to the fortune
of his wife, Teresa Heinz, the widow of Republican Sen. and ketchup
tycoon John Heinz. So while he’s in Washington, Kerry lives in
an elegant Georgetown house and has the option of using a private jet
to get away at one of the Heinz vacation homes.
Federal
election laws limit how much Kerry can use of his wife’s fortune
to finance his own campaign. But she can get around that by buying "issue
ads" which don’t mention the candidate.
And
Teresa isn’t the only connection that John "I’ll take
on special interests" Kerry has made in Washington. According to
the Center for Responsive Politics, during this election cycle, Kerry
took in $531,251 from the health care industry. This makes him one of
the top four recipients of such money, just behind Bush, Howard Dean
and Joe Lieberman.
Kerry
was among the top 10 recipients of money from the airline and automotive
industries, with donations totaling $87,925. By the way, Kerry is a
member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation,
which influences laws governing these industries.
Elizabeth
Schulte writes for the Socialist
Worker.
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