Senator John Kerry is Always Honest with Imus

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry might be the powerful Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former Democratic candidate for president, but on the subject of gangster James “Whitey” Bulger’s arrest after 16 years on the lam, Kerry’s as clueless as the next guy.
 
“It’s just an intriguing story, and obviously all of us from Boston and thereabouts are just caught up in it, because it’s so much a part of our lore,” he said. Allegedly, a group of FBI agents had been “co-opted” by Bulger and his crew, doing them favors for payment, but Kerry noted, “That’s the chatter. That’s what you hear.”
 
Reports indicate that when Bulger was arrested, FBI agents found $800,000 is cash and a stash of guns in his apartment. Sound familiar? “It’s like me in the 80s,” Imus said. “Except there wasn’t any cocaine there.”
 
There probably were a lot of records, however, and while the Senator had a hard time narrowing his favorite songs down to just five, Imus selected his all-time favorite tune in less than three seconds.
 
“The greatest song ever recorded is Delbert McClinton’s I’m a Victim of Life’s Circumstances,” he declared.
 
Having established, well, nothing, Imus and Kerry spent a few moments discussing Bruce Springsteen and the late Clarence Clemons before moving on to Libya, and why the heck the U.S. is there.
 
“We’re barely there,” Kerry said. “We’re there in a very limited support role. We are helping to refuel aircraft. There’s no American being shot at. There’s no American at risk of being shot at. We’re not engaged. We’re not going to put troops on the ground.”
 
All the U.S. is doing, he insisted, is supporting NATO, and by extension, the Arab Spring, which he described as “an awakening” where people are embracing democracy, shunning dictatorship, and sharing in the opportunities of enterprise.
 
“It’s in our interest for them to do that,” Kerry said, since people in countries like Libya and Egypt “have been misled” by radical forces. “A bunch of them want a different life.”
 
Allowing Qaddafi to violently retaliate against the uprising in his country would have sent a signal, Kerry surmised, that the West doesn’t really care. “And then you go right back to where you were,” he said.
 
To Imus’s point that promoting democracy in Gaza resulted in a Hamas-led government, Kerry replied, “That’s because there was an insistence on having an election before a lot of people thought they ought to have an election.” He then blamed George W. Bush’s administration for pushing that election, despite Imus’s advice to “let the Bush thing go.”
 
Back in the present, Kerry believes the decisions Congress and Obama will make over the next few days will be “the definitional moment” for the deficit and the economy as a whole. Republicans are unwilling to put “everything on the table” for the debt negotiations, Kerry said, even though “revenues are the lowest they’ve been in 60 years, relative to GDP.”
 
Now, time for a little game: Kerry would have been a much better president than Obama—true or false?
 
“I’d have been good president,” Kerry said. “Maybe even a great one.”
 
-Julie Kanfer