Formerly known in the Boston I once inhabited as “Live Shot,” John Kerry regularly dragged himself in front of every local camera crew he could find.
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Gathered to cover the collapse of a small set of portable bleachers at an itinerant circus. The opening of the latest E-Z pass lane on the Pike. A dumpster fire in the Back Bay. The mauling of an errant wandering penguin by a tiger in the Stone Zoo. Protesting the increase of wholesale lobster prices at the dock. The dangerous lack of fire extinguishers and comfortable seats on the airport ferry. Or the grave concerns he levied over the location of fire hydrants in Louisburg Square.
Kerry would offer piteously long and wearisome vituperations on the tragedies associated with the horrific situations he welcomed.
“I find it unconscionable today…” he’d intone in his practiced Kennedy-esque-Yalie-Bahstan patter, or, “It is altogether too horrifying to contemplate that…,” and, “I am ashamed to state that in America today,” he’d whine with his best patrician accent about these manifold sins visited on the hapless citizens of the City on the Hill.
You’d swear the man had a police, fire, taxi, and DPW scanner in all of his enormous SUVs. He’d materialize so quickly at every scene of those misadventures broadcast on TV.
“Don’t you know who I am?” he’d blather as he’d shove, using his best St. Paul’s Schoolboy stiff arm, his way through the growing throng of onlookers, firefighters, cops, awakened homeless and media hounds before yanking the cameraman and the lens towards his careworn visage for a somber soliloquy on the unfolding events.
I can still recall Mr. Kerry distressingly denouncing the coddling of a convicted child rapist in federal custody in Devens because the man was receiving…”counseling,” described on every yellow dog sheet as a Democrat birthright.
“I want to ensure … counseling will never serve as a get out of jail free card,” the junior senator scribbled gravely, forgetting that criminals are a Democrat-protected class, in the course of a series of missives traded with the federal bureau of prisons years ago, while overlooking the fact that the 47-year-old man in question was staring at a total 50 years in the can, between the feds and Pennsylvania, virtually insuring that his days on the street, and any further live shots of Mr. Kerry on this caper, were over.
Having wrung the cramps from his hands after these ideographic exertions, Mr. Kerry got down to brass tacks and began a series of heavy liftings in the Boston broadsheets for his favorites: mutinous armchair generals like Pinch Sulzberger, publisher of the NY Times, Honest John Murtha, that now departed anti-military former US Marine and PA representative, and the ever-present far-left anti-war crowd and today’s Chinese sell-outs.
Having e-mailed his op-ed piece to the Boston Herald, setting the stage, before he delivered his anti-war speech at Faneuil Hall in 2006, which occurred on the anniversary of his original apoplectic tirade before Congress, for what he called “an assault on the right to dissent.” Mr. Kerry charged the Republican administration of George Bush with a dreadful smear campaign against the hapless Pentagon generals in this Faneuil Hall jibber jabber, termed “jabberwacky” by his detractors, saying that any criticism of the generals, “is cheap, and that is shameful,” then called for a total and immediate withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq, another mirroring of his own early anti-war activities and forewarning of Afghanistan.
Unlike Jimmy Stewart’s long-lost cinematic icon Mr. Smith, who went to Washington representing the Boy Rangers and stood for something sacred and American, Mr. Kerry always speaks like a highly fictive Winter Soldiers, where he whet his appetite for ever more public exposure, the lies and the stories of totally fabricated atrocities before a befuddled Democratic Congress. Mr. Kerry heaped an unbelievable level of opprobrium on millions of Vietnam vets, forever marking those combat veterans with the mark of Caine, akin to Dan Rather’s similarly concocted bunk, which still tars them today.
Today, Mr. John Forbes Kerry, unlike the majority of veterans he has damaged with his invented tales of barbarity, of arms and legs held aloft, of severed heads, can afford to go to travel in high patrician style, in a caravan of six Santorini black Range Rovers, he can float effortlessly high above the stalled traffic in the Sumner Tunnel in an opulent private $5 million Gulfstream IV jet or cruise the high seas in his fabulously appointed motor yacht, the Isabel. His current life is unlike the vast majority of his military brothers, who must walk, take the bus or travel in a used car, to get to Veteran’s Hospitals he has never visited. His married riches float the weighty lockbox of his conscience.
Mr. Kerry remains anchored in the past, listening for that distant fading applause from the drug-addled and the disaffected, hoping for the destruction of another Republican presidency, for another claim of progressive victory, for one more lost war, for another crackdown on free speech, another raised fist, while basking in the noted fabulist Joe Biden’s golden, though increasingly tarnished, glow as he flies the world, weaving dense contrails of CO2, hoping to change the weather and bend the atmosphere to his will.
In the end, all of his live shots and his promises of the disappearing ice mean just one thing– John Kerry is a little man. He floats above us in magnificent grandeur, hustling money from his billionaire confreres and his latest cry for increased taxes to be levied on us peasants to control the weather as the Climate Tsar. We are the same peasants Mr. Smith fought for.
Without his billionaire bride’s riches and his past starring role in that nearly forgotten Winter Soldiers vaudeville, his is a life writ small.