Assistance: inadvertent and otherwise

Has Power Line rendered inadvertent assistance to the Kerry campaign? Reader Richard Vatsaas directs us to what he believes is “proof that John Kerry reads Power Line.” Vatsaas writes:

I don’t know if you have noticed, but John Kerry has dropped the streamlined “Tour de France” biking togs for the baggy look. This is proof that the Kerry Campaign is taking Power Line very seriously!

Vatsaas refers to the photo below from NRO’s Kerry Spot. I don’t want to say anything to suggest that we’re taking this too seriously, but I think in the future we’ll simply post the photos without comment…
jfk2.jpg
Vatsaas also writes about John Kerry’s representation of himself as a man of the people in connection with the purportedly negligible expense of a windsurfing weekend in Oregon:

Kerry’s dismissal of the expense to fly from Idaho to Oregon to windsurf in the Columbia Gorge got me thinking how much such a weekend vacation (for one Idaho working guy) would actually cost. Via expedia.com I found some pretty good prices. You can fly from Boise to Portland and stay at the Red Lion (I’ve stayed there — it’s nice) 30 miles from the Gorge for only $387, but getting a rental car for two days cost a minimum of $82 for an econo-box. Two day rental of a performance sailboard will run $125, for a grand total of $584 for whole weekend, not counting the cost of food (which would probably be dining at Wendy’s rather than the local yacht club). That’s a pretty big number for somebody who makes about $50k.
Of course the reality is that Columbia gorge is only 360 miles from Boise, and so the tradesman from Idaho would have driven (at a round trip cost for gas: $75) and stayed in the campground ($20) and rented a board if he didn’t already have one ( $125) for a total cost of $220. Would it have occurred to Mr. Kerry that driving his wife’s SUV would have cost less in fossil fuels than taking the jet?

Reader Marc Landers writes us regarding another instance of John Kerry’s use and abuse of POW families in his days as an antiwar protestor. Landers alerts us to this recent Thomas Bray column regarding one of Kerry’s 1971 dog-and-pony shows in Detroit: “Kerry protested Vietnam in Detroit.” Let it be noted that the assistance Kerry rendered on that occasion was not inadvertent. Indeed, it was the kind of assistance usually denominated “aid and comfort.”

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