During the 2004 presidential campaign, I often wondered what Senator Kerry thought of his Winter Soldier days, and the infamous speech to the Senate Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in April 1971 in which he said American troops “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan”.
Did he look back on those statements and the pain they caused both soldiers who were still fighting in Vietnam, and those returning home in the early to mid-1970s as a horrible mistake? A byproduct of a misbegotten Radical Chic past, in much the same way that someone like David Horowitz now views his own misadventures of the same period? As I suspected back then, the answer is, of course not:
On Imus this morning, Senator Kerry resurrected his 35 year old slander on Vietnam era veterans:
Incidentally, when you say I have done something in the past I have told the truth in the past. I have never done anything except tell the truth. And I’m not going to take anybody’s comment to suggest that somehow my telling the truth was a mistake. The American people rely on the truth, and when I came back from southeast Asia, I told the truth, and I am proud that I stood up and told the truth then, and I have told the truth about Iraq every single step along the way.
And in an attempt to apologize for his remarks on Monday, Kerry issues the classic “I’m sorry if you misinterpreted remarks” style non-aplogy apology, and then sticks the shiv in–once again–at the end:
As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop.
I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended.
It is clear the Republican Party would rather talk about anything but their failed security policy. I don
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