Rasmusen's Politics Weblog

Mrs. Heinz Kerry on Mozambique's "Communists"

The New Yorker reports that Mrs. Heinz Kerry is surprisingly sound on the subject of "national liberation movements":

Heinz Kerry�s father moved back to Portugal with his wife after the Socialist regime of Samora Machel came to power in Mozambique, in 1975, and the country became independent. Machel nationalized private property. "My father wanted to die there," she told me with bitterness. "He didn�t come to make money to take back to Portugal. He had nothing in Portugal." But, as crime rose and the economy crumbled, white nationalists who had supported frelimo felt, she said, increasingly embattled and marginalized. "The Portuguese colonials were not bad people compared to the crooks who took over," she told a reporter in Fort Lauderdale last March, and added that she could empathize with the Cuban exile community in South Florida because her parents had also "lost everything to the Communists."

But what did she think of John Kerry's support for the Communists in Vietnam n the 70's and for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 80's? Ten years after the independence of Mozambique, Kerry was still saying--emphatically-- that the Sandinistas were good-guy liberators supported by the people, not the corrupt looters they actually were. This just intensifies the biggest mystery of John Kerry's life: how he got Theresa Heinz to marry him.