Making it personal- Kerry hunched on the lawn head bowed post ribbon toss

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/04/28/making_it_personal/


SCOT LEHIGH -Making it personal
By Scot Lehigh | April 28, 2004

THE PHOTOGRAPH (in the Globe but not on the net) shows a man sitting hunched on the lawn near the Capitol, his head bowed. Sitting beside him is a woman.

The picture, in "The New Soldier," a book of photographs and essays about the April 1971 antiwar protest in Washington, is of John Kerry.

The woman comforting him is Julia Thorne, Kerry's first wife. The photograph was taken just minutes after veterans tossed their war decorations over a wood-and-wire fence erected to keep protesters off the Capitol steps.

Kerry was overcome with emotion at the time. Both David Thorne, Julia's brother and one of Kerry's best friends, and George Butler, the documentary filmmaker who took the picture, recall him being in tears. He had come to Washington to try to wake America up about the Vietnam War, and he had returned ribbons commemorating war heroism he was proud of to make a statement.

Now, 33 years later, the never-ending medal controversy is back, catapulted into the presidential campaign this week by media reports looking at whether Kerry, in a 1971 interview, claimed or implied that he discarded his medals when in fact what he tossed over the fence were his own ribbons and medals given to him by other veterans.<snip>

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.

And Jane sprinkled him with Magic Traitor Dust. And then John dropped a whole lot of LSD and called himself a baby-killer and spat on himself, while Jane was laughing with maniacal glee.

Then the heavens darkened, the thunder roared, the lightning flashed, and the hand of GOD smote the Earth with 30 years of polyester, bad music, scary sex, rising oil prices, Political Correctness, killer bees, illegal music downloading and an epidemic of Acid Reflux Disease.

C'mon now. Kerry threw with ribbons and/or medals away, and he's a rat bastard -- but Bush ducked out of half his TX Air National Guard service and bragged an entire generation of soldiers into a big muddy war, and he gets to take a Mulligan?

Yeah. That makes a whole lot of sense.

--bkl
No Smoting