Why Is John Kerry Questioning A Vietnam Vet’s Patriotism?

John Kerry has been fond of claiming recently that the Bush Administration has broken faith with military veterans by cutting veterans’ benefits. As Bill Hobbs explains, this is fiction. But I have another question: as Hobbs notes, Kerry’s not only challenging Bush, he’s challenging Secretary of Veterans Affairs Anthony Principi. What’s Principi’s background?

A combat-decorated Vietnam veteran, . . . Mr. Principi is a 1967 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., and first saw active duty aboard the destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy. He later commanded a River Patrol Unit in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

How dare Kerry question the commitment to our veterans of a decorated Vietnam veteran?
Of course, I’m being somewhat facetious here – Kerry’s claim that his own Vietnam service immunizes his national security record from criticism, like his other main blathering points about “special interests” and outsourcing, is so flimsy it doesn’t hold up under even the most minimal logical scrutiny. (As one of Tim Blair’s readers put it, “I think I finally understand why Kerry underwent the botox treatments. It’s so he could say all the things he does with a straight face. “). But it’s still fun applying the scrutiny.
Wonkette’s readers had some good ones as well:

* “Vote Kerry: He Led America To Victory In Vietnam!”

* “John Kerry: Pretending To Fight Against Special Interests Since Very Recently”

* “John Kerry Won’t Just Take A Stand On The Tough Issues – He’ll Take Two Or Three Of Them”

* “Kerry: Not in the pocket of most special interests.”

On the other hand, if you want an example of someone actually questioning Kerry’s patriotism, check out this, from NRO:

As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, “our most significant success.”
The KGB organized a vitriolic conference in Stockholm to condemn America’s aggression, on March 8, 1965, as the first American troops arrived in south Vietnam. On Andropov’s orders, one of the KGB’s paid agents, Romesh Chandra, the chairman of the KGB-financed World Peace Council, created the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam as a permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war. It was staffed by Soviet-bloc undercover intelligence officers and received about $15 million annually from the Communist Party’s international department – on top of the WPC’s $50 million a year, all delivered in laundered cash dollars. Both groups had Soviet-style secretariats to manage their general activities, Soviet-style working committees to conduct their day-to-day operations, and Soviet-style bureaucratic paperwork. The quote from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering from this period. I believe it is very like a direct quote from one of these organizations’ propaganda sheets.

If true, this still makes Kerry more a sucker than a traitor – Lenin’s classic “useful idiot” – but it’s a pretty damaging charge. (The author, Ion Mihai Pacepa, “the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc,” has also written about how he used Yasser Arafat as a tool of the Soviet Union and how much of Arafat’s rhetoric was originally developed as Soviet propaganda).