Kerry missing in action!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Washington Times Edotorial


Having missed 89 percent of Senate votes this year and having failed
to cast a single vote since March 25, Sen. John Kerry suddenly - and
with great fanfare -- showed up in late June to vote on behalf of
veterans' health care. The vote attracting Mr. Kerry to Washington was
delayed, although he remained at the Capitol long enough to cast
another of his countless votes against missile defense. Attributing
the delay in the health-care vote to scheduling conflicts, the
Republican Senate leadership effectively denied Mr. Kerry the photo-op
he was seeking. Indeed, it seems that Mr. Kerry has spent more than
three decades repeatedly showing up at the Capitol seeking
military-related photo-ops in an effort to jump-start his political
career.

Before returning to the campaign trail, Mr. Kerry declared: "What I'm
telling our veterans is that when you come home, your country will
take care of you because you took care of us." Coming from Mr. Kerry,
this statement elicits two observations about events that happen to
span his political career. The first relates to Mr. Kerry's views of
veterans upon his return from Vietnam more than 30 years ago. The
second relates to his treatment of U.S. armed forces serving today in
Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Kerry first attempted to jump-started his political career in 1971
by staging one of the biggest photo-ops in Senate history. That
incident also involved veterans. But there was a big difference.
Instead of embracing Vietnam combat veterans during his dramatic April
1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr.
Kerry issued a blanket indictment against them. He charged those
veterans with "war crimes committed in Southeast Asia -- not isolated
incidents -- but [war] crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the
full awareness of officers at all levels of command." Mr. Kerry used
his testimony to launch a bid for the U.S. House in 1972. But even the
coattails of George McGovern, whose only state victory in the
presidential campaign that year was Massachusetts, were inadequate to
the task of electing his fellow war protester.

Regarding the present, it is a shame Mr. Kerry apparently doesn't care
about the troops in the field as much as he claims to care about them
once they become veterans. Mr. Kerry successfully ran for the Senate
in 1984 promising to cancel the Apache helicopter, which has played an
indispensable role on the front lines of the war against terrorism in
Iraq. And, unlike his late June photo-op gambit on veterans' health
care, he refused to adjust his campaign schedule in early June to
return to the Senate in order to vote for the $25
billion in emergency funding bill for military operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

Mr. Kerry's no-show for the $25 billion spending measure contrasts
sharply with the role he played on the previous Iraq-Afghanistan
emergency spending measure last October. On Sept. 14, five weeks
before the Senate vote, Mr. Kerry was asked about the $87 billion
supplemental appropriation that would have funded military operations
in Iraq and Afghanistan and, incidentally, increased spending for
veterans' health care by $1.3 billion. "I don't think any United
States senator is going to abandon our troops and recklessly leave
Iraq to whatever follows as a result of simply cutting and running.
That's irresponsible," Mr. Kerry asserted, adding, "I don't
thinkanyone in Congress is going to not give our troops ammunition,
not give our troops the ability to defend themselves."

But that is precisely what Mr. Kerry did several weeks later. By the
time the vote was held Oct. 17, Mr. Kerry's presidential campaign was
on life-support; the front-running Howard Dean was relentlessly
pounding him for his 2002 vote to authorize the war against Iraq.
Indeed, two Zogby polls conducted within a week of the Oct. 17 vote
showed Mr. Kerry trailing Mr. Dean 21-9 in Iowa and 40-17 in New
Hampshire. After asserting in September that a "nay" vote would be
"irresponsible" and tantamount to "cutting and running," Mr. Kerry
interrupted his presidential campaign and returned to the Senate with
great fanfare in order to vote against the $87 billion
military-funding and reconstruction bill, which won bipartisan
approval in a 87-12 vote.

That was one of the final votes Mr. Kerry cast last year; but it was
typical of the votes that helped to establish him, according to an
authoritative analysis by the National Journal, as the most liberal
member of the Senate for the entire year. Far more disturbing than the
reality that Democrats will be nominating the most liberal member of
their Senate caucus as their presidential candidate (McGovern redux?)
is the fact that Mr. Kerry was willing to sacrifice the well-being of
the troops in harm's way in order to once again jump-start his
political career.