A Pilgrim’s Digression

Kerry Decries Bush’s Military Realignment (washingtonpost.com)

Kerry’s reception by Veterans was apparently pretty cool. Here are the relevant excerpts:

Kerry received his most enthusiastic response from 6,000 VFW members when he strongly advocated improving health care, disability and other benefits for veterans. But overall, he was received here far less enthusiastically than was Bush, who generated two standing ovations during his speech. By contrast, Kerry’s audience offered cordial and polite applause, with one detractor heckling the Massachusetts senator.

The article goes on to quote some of the veterans’ opinions of Kerry. Overall, I felt the Post was going out of its way to present a fair depiction of the event. The article could have been simply about Kerry’s words, rather than about the reaction he received. Here are what some of the veterans said:

Robert Belding, a Persian Gulf War veteran, said he boycotted the speech because Kerry’s “promises don’t reflect his Senate record. He says he supports troops, and then he votes against the $87 billion request to help them.”

“I heard he missed 75 percent of his votes on the intelligence committee,” said World War II veteran Gerald Kulligan, echoing the e-mails being sent out by the Bush campaign. “Who wants a president who works 25 percent of the time?”

Some said they have not forgiven him for protesting the Vietnam War when he returned from the war in 1969. “That was a bad time for guys coming back, and he come back and was hooked with Hanoi Jane,” said Elmo Pennington, a Vietnam War veteran, referring to Jane Fonda’s war protests. “He never made no friends with that.”

Still, others here mobbed Kerry at the stage and praised his push for veterans benefits and his comments protesting the troop realignment. “As a Korean War veteran, I don’t think we can pull out of Korea,” said Jack Carney of Florida.

CBS News goes into more detail (Kerry Slams Bush Recall Plan), stating that the Veteran who heckled Kerry called him a “liar” and was told to keep quiet (”admonished” is the word the reporter uses) by the VFW Sergeants at Arms. CNN reports that two men turned their back on Kerry while he spoke, in imitation of how he turned his back on his Vietnam veteran comrades in 1972.

On WMAL this morning, I heard that last night, CBS News with Dan Rather reported that Kerry’s criticism of the troop withdraw is his biggest flip-flop yet. CBS News reportedly showed footage of Kerry and Edwards on their campaign bus shortly before the Democrat convention. In this footage, Kerry says blatantly that troops should be withdrawn from the Korean peninsula. This has been reported nowhere else.

To find the evidence of this flip flop, I had to turn to–you guessed it–right wing radio. Neil Boortz (he’s a libertarian, not a Republican, if that makes a difference) cites a Boston Globe article from August 2nd, Kerry Edwards Defend Their Agenda, in which Kerry is quoted as saying,

I will have significant, enormous reduction in the level of troops. We will probably have a continued presence of some kind, and certainly in the region. If the diplomacy that I believe can be put in place can work, I think we can significantly change the deployment of troops, not just there but elsewhere in the world — in the Korean Peninsula perhaps, in Europe perhaps.

If Kerry is on tape saying this, you can bet this will make it into a Bush advertisement within the week.