John Kerry - Missing in Action

This op\ed article from The Washington Times is a fair summary of John Kerrys' voting record. I guess he supports the troops. After all, he did vote for them before he voted against them.

Washington Times
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"Regarding the present, it is a shame Mr. Kerry apparently doesn't care about the troops in the field as much as he claims to care about them once they become veterans. Mr. Kerry successfully ran for the Senate in 1984 promising to cancel the Apache helicopter, which has played an indispensable role on the front lines of the war against terrorism in Iraq. And, unlike his late June photo-op gambit on veterans' health care, he refused to adjust his campaign schedule in early June to return to the Senate in order to vote for the $25 billion in emergency funding bill for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Kerry's no-show for the $25 billion spending measure contrasts sharply with the role he played on the previous Iraq-Afghanistan emergency spending measure last October. On Sept. 14, five weeks before the Senate vote, Mr. Kerry was asked about the $87 billion supplemental appropriation that would have funded military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and, incidentally, increased spending for veterans' health care by $1.3 billion. "I don't think any United States senator is going to abandon our troops and recklessly leave Iraq to whatever follows as a result of simply cutting and running. That's irresponsible," Mr. Kerry asserted, adding, "I don't think anyone in Congress is going to not give our troops ammunition, not give our troops the ability to defend themselves."
But that is precisely what Mr. Kerry did several weeks later. By the time the vote was held Oct. 17, Mr. Kerry's presidential campaign was on life-support; the front-running Howard Dean was relentlessly pounding him for his 2002 vote to authorize the war against Iraq. Indeed, two Zogby polls conducted within a week of the Oct. 17 vote showed Mr. Kerry trailing Mr. Dean 21-9 in Iowa and 40-17 in New Hampshire. After asserting in September that a "nay" vote would be "irresponsible" and tantamount to "cutting and running," Mr. Kerry interrupted his presidential campaign and returned to the Senate with great fanfare in order to vote against the $87 billion military-funding and reconstruction bill, which won bipartisan approval in a 87-12 vote.
That was one of the final votes Mr. Kerry cast last year; but it was typical of the votes that helped to establish him, according to an authoritative analysis by the National Journal, as the most liberal member of the Senate for the entire year. Far more disturbing than the reality that Democrats will be nominating the most liberal member of their Senate caucus as their presidential candidate (McGovern redux?) is the fact that Mr. Kerry was willing to sacrifice the well-being of the troops in harm's way in order to once again jump-start his political career."

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