Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Monday, March 15, 2004

Part 1: POWs and MIAs
Part 2: Defense
Part 3: Ties With Vietnam
Part 4: Attacking U.S. Intelligence
Part 5: Pro-abortion Militancy
Part 6: Gay Marriage Flip-Flop
Part 7: Taxes
Part 8: Illegal Aliens/Amnesty
Part 9: Missile Defense

Once, at a fund raiser, Sen. John Forbes Kerry, D-Mass., was described as having “the war record of John Kennedy, the brains of Bill Clinton, the toughness of Lyndon Johnson and the hair of Ronald Reagan.”

Although the last simile is a relatively innocuous comparison, even the good-humored Gipper might not take kindly to the remark.

Kerry was generally a thorn in the popular former president’s side. One example of Kerry bashing the former president is particularly telling about the candidate’s mindset:

When Libyan terrorists bombed a Berlin, Germany, disco frequented by American GIs, Reagan ordered a retaliatory air strike in 1986 that reportedly came close to taking out Libya’s President Moammar Gadhafi. But to Kerry’s way of thinking, the Berlin attack that killed one U.S. soldier and wounded 51 did not merit a military response.

“While I stated that my initial inclination was to support the President,” Kerry wrote in a letter, “I pointed out that two essential tests had to be met in determining whether or not the U.S. action was appropriate. First, the United States had to have irrefutable evidence directly linking the Gadhafi regime to a terrorist act and, second, our response should be proportional to that act.”

Admitting that the evidence tying Tripoli to the disco bombing was “irrefutable,” the U.S. had failed the proportionality test, Kerry argued:

“It is obvious that our response was not proportional to the disco bombing and even violated the Administration’s own guidelines to hit clearly defined terrorist targets, thereby minimizing the risk to innocent civilians. ...

“There are numerous other actions we can take, in concert with our allies, to bring significant pressure to bear on countries supporting or harboring terrorists.”

Of course, history has shown Kerry to have been dead wrong. After America’s no-nonsense shot across Gadhafi’s bow, the dictator mended his ways, eventually establishing secret ties with the CIA to cooperate with the U.S. in counterterrorism.

Most recently, in a stunning development, Gadhafi opened his nation’s nuclear and weapons programs to international inspectors.

Attacking Reagan's Defense Budget

But even before the Libya incident, Kerry was being harsh on the “Great Communicator,” lambasting his defense budget.

In 1984 campaign literature: “We are continuing a defense buildup that is consuming our resources with weapons systems that we don’t need and can’t use.

“The Reagan Administration has no rational plan for our military. Instead, it acts on misinformed assumptions about the strength of the Soviet military and a presumed ‘window of vulnerability,’ which we now know not to exist.

“And Congress, rather than having the moral courage to challenge the Reagan Administration, has given Ronald Reagan almost every military request he has made, no matter how wasteful, no matter how useless, no matter how dangerous.

“The biggest defense buildup since World War II has not given us a better defense. Americans feel more threatened by the prospect of war, not less so. And our national priorities become more and more distorted as the share of our country’s resources devoted to human needs diminishes.”

Doesn’t sound much different from the song Sen. Kerry is singing now in the post-9/11 era.

Also in 1984, the peace-loving Kerry was chanting that we could safely cut from $45-$53 billion from the Reagan defense budget – that year. Included as grist for the Kerry chopping block was “Star Wars,” the strategic space defense initiative. Kerry’s alternative: Scrub the program altogether and save $1.3 billion.

Of course, history again proved that Kerry was dead wrong. Though sometimes derided by the mainstream media, “Star Wars” was indeed a nail in the coffin of the Evil Empire. The Soviets believed the U.S. could build and launch the system, and the race to close the gap helped topple the former USSR.

One must not forget also that at the same time Kerry was working to nix Reagan’s Star Wars, he was also voting against numerous other weapons systems that have since become the mainstay of the U.S. arsenal.

“If we don’t need the MX [multiple warhead ICBM], the B-1, or these other weapons systems ... [t]here’s no excuse for casting even one vote for unnecessary weapons of destruction, and as your Senator, I will never do so,” Kerry vowed.

Challenging Reagan's Fight Against Communism

Then there is the matter of Kerry’s fight against Reagan’s stalwart stand on Communist inroads in this hemisphere.

When U.S. troops intervened in Grenada, Kerry denounced the action as “a bully’s show of force.”

Kerry lent his name to Medical Aid for El Salvador, a political group that brought humanitarian aid to regions of that country held by Communist guerrillas.

He forged himself as one of the Senate’s most vigorous opponents of aiding the anti-Communist contras as a means of pressuring Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime.

“I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell them what to do,” complained Kerry.

When Kerry and company traveled to Managua to try to work their own peace deal with strongman Daniel Ortega, Kerry justified this unilateral undercutting of U.S. policy by saying Reagan had failed to “create a climate of trust” with the Sandinistas.

Kerry was also the pivotal figure in the infamous Iran-Contra hearings that led up to the crisis in the Reagan administration. He spent the spring of 1986 conducting an unauthorized investigation into reports that the Reagan administration was illegally providing aid to the rebel Nicaraguan Contra armies, which were attempting to overthrow the left-wing government of that Central American nation.

Having discovered evidence that some contras had ties to drug smuggling, Kerry ran with this ball as far as he could, getting approval for formal hearings and along the way garnering for himself a welcomed reprise of the national limelight he enjoyed years before as the head of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

As the Iran-Contra affair unfolded, John Kerry discovered an outlet for his still consuming outrage over “seeing the government lie, and realizing the consequences” in Vietnam.

Kerry’s fight against the Reagan Doctrine – which stood for rejecting the Iron Curtain, rejecting Communism and rejecting the status quo – continues today in his new attack against the Bush Doctrine.

Some have styled the Bush Doctrine as more aptly the Reagan-Bush Doctrine. In Reagan’s day, the Soviet Union was extending its tentacles over several continents, including South America. Reagan firmly believed that, for humanitarian and national-security reasons, the Soviets had to be defeated – not tolerated or simply contained.

Reagan fought severe criticism from many of the same Democrats who now disparage George Bush. Like Reagan, Bush forged ahead, setting in motion events that, in his case, freed 50 million Afghans and Iraqis and badly crippled the terrorist networks that had been funded and encouraged by the oppressive Taliban and Hussein regimes.

Meanwhile, Kerry is quick enough to embrace the Gipper when it suits his purposes.

President Bush is touting his Moscow Treaty as a way to “liquidate the legacy of the Cold War” by eliminating thousands of nuclear arms left over from a bygone era when the United States and Russia faced each other across the nuclear divide.

Strangely, Kerry, the old Reagan nemesis, has invoked the former president in his argument against the Bush treaty, arguing that the treaty’s most dangerous weakness is the rejection of Ronald Reagan’s great doctrine of “trust but verify.”

Often the butt of the witticism that he never met the side of an issue he didn’t like, Kerry can apparently even manage ambivalence about Ronald Reagan.

Editor's note: