Paris 1971 - NYC 2018 - Part 2

. . . Kerry himself acknowledged that his visit to Paris was “on the borderline” of legality. Actually, it extended far beyond that “borderline.” A federal law known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice prescribed severe punishment (including, in some cases, the death penalty) for any person who “without proper authority, knowingly harbors or protects or gives intelligence to or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly.”

During the ensuing months, Kerry, with increasing stridency, continued to exhort the U.S. to accept the Viet Cong peace proposals. His radical VVAW comrades went so far as to sign a “People’s Peace Treaty,” whose nine points were all extracted from a list of Viet Cong conditions for ending the war. Kerry fully supported this treaty.​

General No Nguyen Giap, the Supreme Commander of the Viet Minh (NVA) forces said, in a 1989 interview with CBS’s Morley Safer,

“We paid a high price, but so did you…not only in lives and material…After Tet the Americans had to back down and come to the negotiating table, because the war was not only moving into…dozens of cities and towns in South Vietnam, but also to the living rooms of Americans back home for some time. The most important result of the Tet offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory…The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion.” (The Vietnam War: An Encyclopedia of Quotations, Howard Langer, 2005)​

UPDATE​

Politicized Justice: Democrats went gaga over a little-known law they claimed an advisor to President Trump violated following the 2016 presidential campaign. Now, the shoe's on the other foot, and both the Democrats and the media that supported them have grown strangely quiet.

The law in question is the 219-year-old Logan Act, which makes it a felony for Americans to negotiate with foreign powers in an effort to undermine the U.S. in a dispute.​

John Kerry spent all his life getting things wrong. He came home from the war in Vietnam to trash as war criminals the men with whom he wore the colors.

He told a hearing of the U.S. Senate a wicked tale of calumny, how the Americans in Vietnam 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.”

It was all a lie, and he knew it was a lie, dramatic, convenient and self-serving.
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Kerry, by sharp contrast, is consulting with foreign powers for the purpose of counteracting the sitting president’s policy on Iran.

This is hardly the first time Democratic grandees—including Kerry himself—have pretended to be secretaries of state when the incumbent administration had rejected their policy views. In 1985, Kerry and then-Sen. Tom Harkin traveled to Managua to meet with Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega in an explicit attempt to undermine the Reagan administration’s policy of aiding anti-communist Sandinistas. Former senator Chris Dodd and House member Peter Kostmayer, among others, were fond of sending letters to Ortega apologizing for Reagan administration policy.

Former president Jimmy Carter is still the most famous and aggressive shadow diplomat in the United States. He has inserted himself into U.S. foreign relations, uninvited, time and again since leaving office in 1981. In 2003 he met with the Japanese in order to undermine Bush administration policy on North Korea; in 1986 he met with Ortega regime officials in opposition to Reagan administration policy; and in the Middle east he has been a constant adversary to Republican administrations. One might also consider Ted Kennedy’s offer to coach Soviet officials on nuclear disarmament and to orchestrate favorable American media coverage of a (never realized) visit by Soviet premier Yuri Andropov.​