Hugh Hewitt played an audio tape of John Kerry's testimony before Congress as a 27-year-old anti-war activist and failed Congressional candidate, in a show I regrettably missed. Fortunately, Hugh posted during his final hour of the show and recapped the reaction from his listeners and his own excellent insight into the relevance of Kerry's politics circa 1971:

I played John Kerry's 1971 testimony on the radio program, and the response was intense. The first two hours brought scores of calls and e-mails which denounced Kerry for his slander of the military that served in Vietnam and for his understanding of the war. Kerry has thus far successfully dodged a discussion of the specifics of his testimony, and it was very hard to find the audio --it took my producer Duane considerable digging to find the tape.

The impact of actually hearing Kerry slander the military--his accent is unbelieveable, and his tone of arrogance and condescension repulsive-- is powerful, and I do not believe he can serve successfully as Commander-in-Chief given the reactions I heard from veterans and currently serving military. We are in the middle of a war, and the Democrats are in the process of nominating a man hated by a large portion of the uniformed service for his actions of thirty years ago.

I am more concerned about his judgment today than his judgment of 33 years ago. Kerry made his statement at the age of 27, after a first run for Congress, and his career since has been an unbroken campaign to neuter the American military though he would deny this from dawn till dark. He does not understand that America has real enemies today that won't play by his rules any more than he understood communism in 1971. He just doesn't get it. Period. His honorable service and his heroism in no way covers the terrible judgment he has displayed since he returned from the battlefield.

While Kerry supporters will shrug this off as being 33 years old -- more than half a lifetime for Kerry -- his own party undermined that position earlier this month by attempting to make Bush's National Guard service a campaign issue. The chairman of the DNC himself went on national TV and declared that Bush dodged his service in 1972-23 without a shred of proof to support the allegations. Now that some Guardsmen from that period have come forward to confirm that Bush served with them in Alabama, they want to put the 70s behind them once again, but they will find that door difficult to close now.

As I've written earlier, Americans want to believe in redemption and personal growth, but they want to see evidence of it from candidates, especially those who espoused radical views during their political career, as Kerry did. (He ran for Congress in 1970 and testified in 1971.) If such growth can be demonstrated from a solid legislative record or policy-position standpoint, a good candidate should be able to rise above a radical youth. Kerry clearly cannot demonstrate anything along these lines, as Hugh states in his blog tonight. Kerry's legislative record, especially over the past two decades in the Senate, shows that the presumptive nominee attacks spending for critical military systems and the intelligence community whenever he gets the chance. Far from growing and repenting, Kerry operated from the core philosophies he espoused in VVAW and his 1971 testimony against the Vietnam War.

Putting a man with such a track record in the White House in the middle of a war on Islamofascism should scare the hell out of everyone except the terrorists. I can't believe that Americans would do that in the end.

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Check out the Captain's comments over at Captain's Quarters, where he reviews the reasons why, now that Kerry, et. al., have let the Viet Nam genie out of the bottle, its going to be hard to get it back in... [Read More]

Tracked on February 18, 2004 10:33 AM