John Kerry caused a bit of a stir this week when he mentioned that he had "met foreign leaders who can't go out and say this publicly, but boy, they look at you and say, 'You've got to win this, you've got to beat this guy, we need a new policy,' things like that." "Sen. Kerry's foreign friends may prefer him as U.S. president, but the election is in the hands of the American people," responded
Bush spokesman Terry Holt.
For a lot of wingers, this was the launch code to go xenophobic. Some sleuths have started trolling through Kerry's travels to show that he couldn't have "met" with any foreign leaders since he began his campaign. (Never mind that the leaders of many of the world's biggest or most powerful nations--Germany, France, Russia, Brazil, Korea--came to power by publically opposing cooperation with Bush's policies, and the purported meetings could have occured before the Fall of 2003.) But Rush Limbaugh didn't worry too much about whether the meetings took place. No, Limbaugh relished the opportunity to "accept" Kerry's claim:
We have unnamed world leaders who somehow have reached out to John Kerry and have prayed and have urged him to win. The whole world wants Kerry to win. The fact is, he's probably telling the truth. I'll bet there are a lot of world leaders who would love to have a pacifist, ago knifing intellectual flip-flopping phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock 'n' roller in the White House for a change, people like Kim Jong ll, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Yasser Arafat, Father Aristide, "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Slobodan Milosevic. And I'll tell you who the number one guy, who has no doubt reached out to Kerry - Saddam Hussein.
(I'm not sure what much of that meant, for which I'm thankful.)
At a party fundraiser on Friday, Republican National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie continued on that theme. "Senator Kerry's got a vivid imagination," Gillespie said. "His imaginary friends have foreign and British accents."
From the reaction of his supporters, you might think George W. Bush would not want the committed support of foreign leaders, especially those with French accents. But that was not his response in 2000 when a journalist shouted to Bush that Canadian Prime Minister Poutine was supporting his candidacy. "I appreciate his strong statement," Bush replied. "He understands Canadians are strong and we'll work closely together."
There were several problems with this, as viewers of the satirical Canadian television show "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" might remember. First, the journalist was really a prankster from the cast of "This Hour." Second, the Canadian PM had not endorsed Bush. And finally, the Canadian PM at the time was named Chretien, not Poutine, which is really the name for a dish of French fries slathered with a thin brown gravy and cheese curd that's popular with Quebeckers. (Chretien's office didn't mind the mistake: their official response was that "Clearly, Canada is not in the Bush leagues.")
Unless Kerry divulges more details of his purported meetings with world leaders, we're left to speculate about the accents of his friends who are foreign leaders, whether they're real or imagined. But we do know that at least one foreign leader whose support George W. Bush embraced was Francophone. Bush's problem, however, isn't that that foreign leader had an accent; his problem is that he was imaginary.
Somebody might want to mention that to Ed Gillespie.
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