OPINION:
When the Egyptians took to the streets to depose the Obama administration’s favored despot, their Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, Secretary of State John F. Kerry went curiously missing. The White House gave out photographs of President Obama engaged with his national security advisers in Washington. Mr. Kerry’s chair was empty.
Was he windsurfing in Burgundy? Sipping a pinot noir in Nice? Mosheh Oinounou, a producer of the CBS show “This Morning,” found him, tweeting a photograph of Mr. Kerry’s 76-foot yacht “Isabel” with a man on board bearing a suspicious resemblance to the secretary of state.
In a classic case of “who you are going to believe, me or your lying eyes,” the State Department issued an absolute, ironclad, copper-bottomed denial. “Any report or tweet that he was on a boat is completely inaccurate,” Mr. Kerry’s spokesman said. Foggy Bottom spin doctors insisted their leader was hard at work conferring somewhere with world leaders about the unfolding crisis.
Some whoppers, like this one, collapse quickly. When the Isabel docked, a presidential-size motorcade met it, and such things don’t go unnoticed in Nantucket, the small isle off the Massachusetts coast that is a summertime favorite of the nice people. The State Department cover story quickly capsized, and denials were scuttled. Mr. Kerry was indeed on Nantucket, the spin doctors of Foggy Bottom conceded, but “only briefly on his boat.” He might have been lounging in an upholstered deck chair, but the unfolding story in Cairo was constantly topped up, along with his wine glass.
Mr. Kerry’s yacht has been a headache before. As a senator from Massachusetts, Mr. Kerry has for years advocated higher taxes on all Americans, especially on “the rich.” The rich know how to stay that way, so Mr. Kerry docked the $7 million Isabel, no doubt bought with his second wife’s late husband’s convenient fortune, in neighboring Rhode Island, instead of Massachusetts, in order to avoid the high taxes and fees of Massachusetts (which the poor folk there call Taxachusetts). Mr. Kerry escaped paying $500,000 to the state he represented and calls home.
Mr. Kerry shouldn’t be faulted for his wife’s money and knowing how to spend it. The offense is how eager the State Department was to mislead the rest of us while trying to dream up an explanation for the role of its diplomats, beginning with Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the death of an American ambassador in Benghazi. Soldiers die for their country, as the saying goes, and diplomats lie for their country. But this State Department has lately been abusing diplomatic privilege. Mrs. Clinton lied to the families of the Americans slain in Benghazi, peddling the absurd story that an Islamic mob was inflamed by a tasteless video portrayal, which the U.S. government had nothing to do with, of the Prophet Muhammad. The State Department is spending $700,000 to pursue “likes” for its Facebook page. Well, millions of Americans don’t like, and that’s no lie.
The Washington Times
Please read our comment policy before commenting.