Last week, I said Jeremiah Wright might turn out to be the Sister Souljah of 2008. But maybe he’s the unexpected, unintended equivalent of the Swift Boat Vets for Truth.
A centerpiece of John Kerry’s early 2004 campaign was Kerry the war hero, Kerry the valiant soldier who was wounded three times in service of his country. And then the Swift Boat Vets for Truth came along, and reminded many of another side of John Kerry, the man who smeared the reputation of those who he served with by declaring, under oath before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that they had…
personally 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 Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war…
Having been sold an image of Kerry as a man beloved by his crewmates and shipmates, many Americans were jarred to see so many who had served with him, still brewing a quiet fury over what they saw as a betrayal and a vicious lie in furtherance of his burgeoning political career as the face of the anti-war movement.
Suddenly, John Kerry the candidate no longer matched the image that had been sold to them.
Since 2004, we’ve been told about Barack Obama, the healer. Barack Obama, the uniter, the post-partisan, post-racial, “leader of the 21st century,” who will take a country of red states and blue states and turn them into red white and blue states. After all, he said, they worship an “awesome God” in those blue states…
And now we see that Obama’s church declares, “God d*** America.” That the 9/11 attacks were chickens coming home to roost. That the U.S. government created the AIDS virus. The award to Farrakhan, the trip to Libya to meet Khadafi…
And many Americans (and more than a few Democrats) are now asking, “who is this guy?” Why are we learning that there’s another side to the candidate that completely contradicts the healing, uniting image?