Sometimes you just have to shake your head:
John Kerry’s family dumped millions of dollars of foreign holdings as he launched his White House bid, gobbling up Made in the USA stocks in a huge politically savvy international-to-domestic shift.
The investments, mostly in the name of Kerry’s multimillionaire wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, sold stock in massive overseas players like Heineken, Sony, British Petroleum and Italian Telecom for red, white and blue companies like McDonald’s, Dell and Kohls.
In all, the Kerrys dumped as much as $16 million worth of international stock and bought between $18 million and $32 million in domestic holdings between 2002 and 2003, records show.
Okay, so far, so what? This kind of thing happens all the time in politics; innumerable politicians of all parties have traded in their Mercedes or Lexi for Chevys and Fords just before (or after) declaring their candidacy. It’s done to avoid being labelled as “helping them furriners,” and really, it’s no big deal. But then you read something like this:
Marla Romash, a senior adviser to Kerry, said the financial decisions aren’t political.
“The trustees and Mrs. Heinz Kerry have asked these investment managers, who make their own investment decisions, only to take appropriate steps to ensure that investments are responsible and financially prudent,” Romash said. “The trustees review these investments periodically with the managers to ensure that these investments are responsible as well as financially prudent.”
Oh, please. Ms. Romash, you’re lying, and it’s patently obvious that you’re lying. It’s not smart for a campaign spokescreature to assume that her audience is just mind-bogglingly gullible, particularly when it’s so easy to fact-check your ass:
[T]he timing of the sales appears to be an anomaly among a relatively consistent investment pattern.
Through most of Kerry’s federal disclosure forms, the Heinz Kerry trusts – which invest some of the massive inheritance after the death of her first husband, Sen. H. John Heinz III, more than a decade ago – show steady investments and sales of overseas assets.
In the spring of 2002, as Kerry seriously began weighing a presidential run, there appeared to be a marked increase in sales of overseas holdings.
Those stocks were sold because Sugar Mama’s hubby was running for president, and didn’t want to be embarrassed by his wife’s being invested heavily in foreign companies (on the other hand–what are Kerry’s overseas backers going to make of that?).
C’mon, Kerry campaign. Be honest enough to admit it. If we can’t trust you on something this obvious, why should we trust you at all?
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