Another Kerry Whopper

The Washington Times has a page 1 investigative piece ("Security Council members deny meeting Kerry") in tomorrow's edition (Monday, Oct. 25, 2004) that shreds an important John Kerry claim: that he met with the members of the U.N. Security Council just before the October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq. An excerpt:

At the second presidential debate earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said he was more attuned to international concerns on Iraq than President Bush, citing his meeting with the entire Security Council.

"This president hasn't listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable," Mr. Kerry said of the Iraqi dictator.

Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the "real readiness" of the United Nations to "take this seriously" because he met "with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein."

But of the five ambassadors on the Security Council in 2002 who were reached directly for comment, four said they had never met Mr. Kerry. The four also said that no one who worked for their countries' U.N. missions had met with Mr. Kerry either.

The former ambassadors who said on the record they had never met Mr. Kerry included the representatives of Mexico, Colombia and Bulgaria. The ambassador of a fourth country gave a similar account on the condition that his country not be identified.

Ambassador Andres Franco, the permanent deputy representative from Colombia during its Security Council membership from 2001 to 2002, said, "I never heard of anything."

Although Mr. Franco was quick to note that Mr. Kerry could have met some members of the panel, he also said that "everything can be heard in the corridors."

Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico's then-ambassador to the United Nations, said: "There was no meeting with John Kerry before Resolution 1441, or at least not in my memory."

All had vivid recollections of the time frame when Mr. Kerry traveled to New York, as it was shortly before the Nov. 7, 2002, enactment of Resolution 1441, which said Iraq was in "material breach" of earlier disarmament resolutions and warned Baghdad of "serious consequences as a result of its continued violations."

Stefan Tafrov, Bulgaria's ambassador at the time, said he remembers the period well because it "was a very contentious time."

After conversations with ambassadors from five members of the Security Council in 2002 and calls to all the missions of the countries then on the panel, The Times was only able to confirm directly that Mr. Kerry had met with representatives of France, Singapore and Cameroon.

And ...

A U.S. official with intimate knowledge of the Security Council's actions
in fall of 2002 said that he was not aware of any meeting Mr. Kerry had with members of the panel.

An official at the U.S. mission to the United Nations remarked:
"We were as surprised as anyone when Kerry started talking about a meeting with the Security Council."

The money quotes:

The revelation that Mr. Kerry never met with the entire U.N. Security Council could be problematic for the Massachusetts senator, as it clashes with one of his central foreign-policy campaign themes — honesty.

The Democrat has also made his own veracity a centerpiece of his campaign, calling truthfulness
"the fundamental test of leadership."

Mr. Kerry closed the final debate by recounting what his mother told him from her hospital bed, "Remember: integrity, integrity, integrity."

The bottom line: John Kerry fibbed again. When the spotlight comes on, his imagination soars, and he doesn't necessarily say what is true, just what ought to be true if the world were perfect for John Fakin' It Kerry.

Is the fabrication part of a strategy? If it is, it's reprehensible. Is the fabrication an inadvertent part of Kerry's thought processes? If it is, that's really scary.

Any surprises here? None. This is Kerry-caught-lying-again. The only question is whether, with 9 days left before election day, will it will make any difference? Anyone with common sense should know that you don't want a president who cannot distinguish reality from fantasy.
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UPDATE -- The Pajamahadeen of the Blogosphere are similar under-whelmed by the Washington Times article, at least in the sense that it tells us nothing new about Mr. Kerry and only confirms what we suspected. To paraphrase one writer, in any other year a major presidential candidate who lied about meetings with the Security Council would face lots of hostile press scrutiny; meanwhile Kerry gets a pass.

The always articulate Roger L. Simon, however, weighs in with the "S" word on Kerry, that word being Sociopath. You can catch his drift with Christmas in Cambodia All Over Again .

In other news from the Kerry world of Mendacity and Prevarication, Football Fans for Truth spots a verifiable whopper as Johnny tells of being only 30-yards away from a famous Game 6 World Series game in 1986, in New York's Shea Stadium, when the hometown newspapers in Boston most definitely record his presence at a dinner in Boston at exactly the same moment. Perhaps the good senator knows how to bi-locate. It would come in handy during a political campaign.

UPDATE II -- This may be a bigger story than we thought. Redstate.org breaks down each instance that Kerry has told the "I met with the entire Security Council" story, and wow, has he told it a bunch. Redstate argues that it goes to the heart of whether Kerry is the major league diplomatic he claims to be or whether he's a major league imposter, telling whoppers at point blank range to the American people.

We were inclined to shrug our shoulders at first, but after reading this assemblage of Kerry quotes we think it deserves wider attention.