THE FOLKS HE DIDN'T WANT ON HIS BOAT:

Kerry's new Vietnam fix: Refugees of communist takeover won't forget, forgive his past (Jan Golab, September 11, 2004, Los Angeles Daily News)

"If you want to be president, you have to talk to everybody in America, and that is what we are going to do," Sen. John Kerry declared last July, when he spoke before the NAACP. It was a dig against President George W. Bush, who had declined an invitation to speak to that organization.

But there's no way Kerry will ever speak to America's 1.2 million Vietnamese-Americans, most of whom live in California. Many of California's Vietnamese-Americans will be in Washington, D.C., today to join with Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and many thousands of other veterans in a nationwide protest. [...]

As a star of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry preached that the Vietnamese communists were not repressive totalitarians like the Soviets or Chinese. The Viet Cong were hippie rice farmers who just wanted to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya." They were the nice communists. America, meanwhile, was an imperialist oppressor.

Millions of boomers bought into this terrible lie.

Kerry lionized Ho Chi Minh, ignored Soviet support of the NVA and accused the U.S. of being "paranoid about the so-called communist monolith." Asked by a questioning senator in 1971 what would be the effects of an immediate U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam, Kerry responded: "Having done what we have done to that country, we have an obligation to offer sanctuary to the perhaps 2,000, 3,000 people who might face political assassination or something else."

That same week, he appeared on the Dick Cavett show. "There'd be no interest on the part of the Vietnamese to start massacring people after the U.S. has pulled out," Kerry told Cavett.

To this day, Kerry has never disavowed or apologized for those statements. Kerry has never admitted how dead wrong he was.

As in 3 million dead.

After the U.S. withdrew from Saigon on April 30, 1975, 750,000 Vietnamese were forced into re-education camps. Many did not survive. Some 130,000 took to boats and 1 million more fled overland. Next door, the Khmer Rouge claimed 2 million lives in the Killing Fields. The plight of the boat people was an unspeakable nightmare.

Lac Nguyen, director of the nonprofit Vietnamese Community of Southern California, is typical of many Orange County refugees. He served in the South Vietnamese government and as an officer in the army. After the fall of Saigon, he spent three years in jail and labor camps, as did others in his family. His father and five uncles were all killed by the communists.

"I am one of the boat people," Nguyen says. "We don't feel happy with Mr. John Kerry. The majority of Vietnamese refugees here are survivors of communist oppression. We all have family members who were killed or spent years in prison. If John Kerry comes here, he will see our reaction. And he will see it elsewhere, in New York, Boston, Florida as well." [...]

Dan Tran believes Kerry has underestimated the impact Vietnamese-Americans will have on the election. Half of our nation's 1.2 million Vietnamese-Americans live in California, a state widely considered not to be in play.

"Kerry doesn't believe there are enough in California to sway the vote," says Tran, who thinks differently, especially if Bush gets a boost in California from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. "I think Kerry and his campaign manager have made a very wrong assumption. Kerry went after the Cubans in Miami but he thinks the Vietnamese won't make a difference there. He's wrong. In 2000, only 500 votes made the difference. So the 20,000 Vietnamese-Americans in Florida can make the difference, as well as in other states like Arizona and New Mexico, where it's a very tight race."

Gotta think Karl Rove is working this angle.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 13, 2004 11:55 AM