John Kerry has built his life and career on the concept that he is smarter than everyone else. He did it to me and my fellow Vietnam veterans and got away with it for the simple reason he had the audacity to early seize the media microphone and proclaim all of his fellow veterans to be something lesser, morally and ethically, than he himself. Today, forty-plus years later, this phony war hero still controls the stage and the microphone because life and fate do not always reward the just or punish the unjust.

If there were ever a man fated for politics, it was John Kerry, a man who actually sought combat for the singular purpose of having such service as an enhancement to his political resumé. I served in ground combat in Vietnam and I can tell you I never once met such a person, someone there merely to seek points to bolster his future political career, never, ever, ever, which in my opinion makes John Kerry both a rare and untrustworthy dude indeed.  The men that Kerry served with, the Swift boat veterans, said the very same thing when they were forced by Kerry’s political aggression to reveal the truth about this phony warrior who used them and their units as nothing but a springboard to forward his own political destiny. Believe me, no one knows you better than the men who serve beside you in combat and John Kerry failed that test miserably if you examine the testimony of those who served closest to him.

Yet here we are, four decades later, and this phony war hero and genuine gigolo is still looking down his nose at those he deems inferior, but this time it extends far beyond his fellow veterans to encompass all Americans who don’t see our country’s political future as he does. Back in 2004, I wrote many poems and essays in support of the Swift boat vets and the honorable dead of our war whom Kerry had besmirched,  one of which, Their Veteran’s Day, said this of Kerry’s defeat:

Some said let you apologize
But that wouldn’t do it in our eyes.
A man astride of each position
Could we believe your true contrition?
And on deaf ears your words would fall
To those whose names are on that Wall
The vindication they now accept
In settling up this long-held debt,
Is that for them we gave our best
And denied you, John, your lifelong quest.
We fought for them, fought for our own,
To make you reap what you had sown.
Listen carefully John to what we say,
November 2d was their Veterans’ Day.

It’s far beyond the time for Americans to quit allowing this pompous phony, John Kerry, to speak to us and of us as if we are some peasant rabble incapable of comprehending his world view.  This phony-baloney, John Kerry, should be grateful that the pitchfork bearing peasants he has so long denigrated haven’t rumbled him through the streets of Washington on his way to the political guillotine he so richly deserves.  If he keeps speaking so ill of those Tea Partiers who are rapidly gaining power, that may well prove to be his fate.

The voices in our long, black Wall would agree that there is no one more deserving.