Blowback

Hugh Hewitt makes an interesting point today regarding John Kerry’s 1971 Senate testimony. Along with slandering his former comrades in arms, Kerry made a prediction about how many refugees might be expected if South Vietnam were overrun:

“But I think, having done what we have done to that country, we have an obligation to offer sanctuary to the perhaps 2,000, 3,000 people who might face, and obviously they would, we understand that, might face political assasination or something else.”

Of course, the numbers of Vietnamese forced out and murdered after Saigon fell were several orders of magnitude greater than “2,000, 3,000 people”, and that’s not even mentioning the vast slaughter in Cambodia. Kerry’s errant prediction was as horribly wrong as Sydney Schanberg’s idiotic, “for most, a better life,” propaganda in the New York Times as Phnom Penn was being overrun.

Hewitt notes that such statements may well have resonance in California’s Asian immigrant communities:

According to the 2000 Census, there are 1,122,528 Vietnamese Americans, 447,032 of whom live in California… [snip] I wonder how John Kerry’s antiwar record will play in Orange County, California’s Little Saigon? Or to the state’s approximately 70,000 Cambodian Americans?

Hewitt has obtained an audio tape of Kerry’s testimony, and has already played it in its entirety on his radio show. He says he plans to play it again soon…