I voted for Senator John Kerry for president in 2004.  I would've voted for anyone but Bush.  I never believed Bush's and Cheney's accusations and threats about Saddam Hussein's cache of weapons of mass destruction.  For one thing, if Hussein had had access to such weapons, why didn't he use them against U.S. military forces when they attacked his country in 2003?  Did he get scruples after having gassed thousands of Kurds in 1988?  His chemical weapons technology and materials came from Singapore, the Netherlands, Egypt, West Germany, India, France, and the United States of America.  We in first world nations often help the murderers we call monsters.
     By 2003, as proven in U.N. disarmament records, Hussein's access to WMD was fantasy concocted by Bush and Cheney, distributed and published by U.S. news media, believed in by, among many American politicians, John Kerry, who, on October 9, 2002, said, "I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."
     He may as well have said, "I will be voting to the give the President of the United States the authority to use lies..."
     Two years later Kerry lost to the son of a bitch.  By then, the fall of 2004, the senator must've realized that the president had lied; in fact, he and Cheney had told an effective lie, based (for chuckles) on an utter absurdity: that Hussein, even if he did possess nuclear weapons, would actually use them on U.S. soil, an act that would precipitate hellfire on his own country.
     The U.S. news media at the time missed this absurdity, too.  It's the kind of ridiculous idea that persists even in the face of authorities attempting to use logic in the general political discourse, which, these days, consists of presidential candidates boasting about their wives' looks, and also debating about Donald Trump's prick size.
     John Kerry, as Secretary of State, is worried about what the leaders of other nations think of the current U.S. political scene.  Today's The Guardian, in an article on Kerry's appearance on Face the Nation, shows this grave concern: "I think it's fair to say that [leaders abroad] are shocked [by this year's presidential election].  It upsets people's sense of equilibrium about our steadiness, about our reliability, and to some degree I must say to you, some of the questions, the way they're posed to me, it's clear to me that what's happening is an embarrassment to our country."
     Really, Kerry?  You figured that out a year and five days after Ted Cruz announced his presidential run at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, to an auditorium filled with students who had to attend?  You didn't think before now that world leaders, regarding the low quality minds of such lunatic politicians as Cruz, Walker, Trump, and Jeb Bush, all of them in the race by last June, have been alarmed by the American political scene for a long time?
     The Guardian article amusingly states: "Kerry did not specify which candidates or remarks had embarrassed the US, but he was clearly alluding to controversial proposals from the Republican candidates."
     For "controversial," read "illegal."
     Yes, Kerry, like most people who think things through, believes Ted Cruz's notion to have policemen surveil "Muslim neighborhoods" is fucking crazy, although the Secretary of State would probably describe it as "imprudent and impractical."  Trump's hard-on for torture and for killing family members of suspected terrorists also rubs Kerry the wrong way; he's a humanitarian.
     Kerry says we shouldn't live in fear.  Don't be oblivious to your surroundings.  Try telling that to the Millennial generation, a mass of young humans who cross street intersections while looking at their iPhones.  In any case, Kerry has this advice for us: "It means avoid a crowded place where you have no control over who may be there.  Have a sense of vigilance to watch who's around you."
     This, from a man who was conned by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who resembles the Penguin played by Burgess Meredith, when Cheney lied to politicians and Americans at large, to the U.S. military, so that he could help his favorite corporation, Halliburton, reap the harvest of death in Iraq.
     Kerry's warning about "avoiding large crowds," which I've heard other government officials say, I guess means you should never go to an airport, mall, bus or train station, outdoor market, cities, popular museums--in fact, you probably shouldn't even be living on Earth.
     Here's the irony as I see it: except for Bernie Sanders, who focuses on domestic economic issues (so-called "bread and butter"), the other candidates, Clinton, Trump, Cruz, and Kasich, all believe in American might, in stomping on opposition to that dominance.  They're unremarkable in this viewpoint.  U.S. foreign policy, its practitioners and supporters, its apologists among the common U.S. populace, is dedicated to control of the world, or as much of it as possible to control at any given time.  Total control always eludes, but a chronic aspiration for containment of problems threatening that quest for control continuously abides, regardless of the White House's occupant.
     Kerry's lament about America becoming an "embarrassment," is another way of saying that he, as Secretary of State (prime representative of U.S. foreign policy since 2013) is watching the rise in the Republican Party of fools who don't know what the fuck they're doing, Trump and Cruz being the two most dangerous, and also the greatest threats to American security, i.e. dominance--an offensive posture calling itself "defense."  Kerry worries about recklessness in the possible next president.  I think it's safe to say he's not worried about Hillary Clinton, because she exemplifies traditional American foreign policy.  She'll kill and exert control, just like Barack Obama does.  Trump and Cruz, Kerry worries, will go apeshit with the killing and alienate allies in the process.  They're jokers; Hillary's the Queen of Diamonds, the trigger card that makes Laurence Harvey shoot his wife in The Manchurian Candidate; in other words, Clinton's underhanded, crafty, while Trump is a sledgehammer and Cruz is a tapeworm.
     Kerry's message today is, "Republican candidates...don't fuck up American exceptionalism."

                                                                              Vic Neptune