As everyone is surely aware, the United States has been perched on the precipice of yet another war for the last few weeks, as our foreign policy apparatus wrestles with itself over whether to punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons against the rebels seeking to overthrow the present regime.
The whole thing has been kind of confusing, as President Obama was first being condemned (by the opposition party) for not bombing, then condemned (by the opposition party) for suggesting that he would.
The most strident advocate for a military strike has been Secretary of State John Kerry. (Yes, it’s certainly strange to see Republicans opposing a military action, particularly one against a foe of Israel — until you remember that the military action was proposed by Barack Obama.) Kerry has been on television more over the last few weeks than at any time since he lost the 2004 presidential election, and I understand that he (accidentally?) found a possible diplomatic solution to the problem the other day, but I don’t quite understand what he said, because every time I watch the clips I’m too busy staring at his weird, bloated, misshapen face.
I generally don’t subscribe to the kind of conspiracy theories that suggest that the media colludes to ignore Big Stories and keep the public in the dark. But this is giving me second thoughts. Something has obviously happened to John Kerry’s face, and no one is reporting on it.
A botched facelift, or at the very least a triple overdose of Botox, seems likeliest. I’ve touched on this before, but it bears repeating: there is nothing as distracting as a bad facelift (and by bad I mean at all noticeable), and the people likeliest to get them (people in the public eye) are the very people who absolutely shouldn’t.
In a way, maybe it’s appropriate that America, land of the free and home of the Real Housewives, is being represented abroad by someone who looks like he may recently have gotten into a Brundlefly-type arrangement with some kind of reptile.
But when John Kerry is dispatched to negotiate with Russia over whether and how to stop the war crimes of the Assad regime, wouldn’t it be better if his Russian counterpart were able to hear the words coming out of his mouth, rather than silently arguing with himself about whether Kerry was in a catastrophic car accident, or actually an android whose wax visage wasn’t allowed to cool quite long enough.
Furthermore, it suggests a basic unseriousness. When your job is guiding the foreign relations of the most powerful country in the world, oughtn’t you have bigger things on your mind than your looks? Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards, got a raft of grief during the 2004 campaign when it came out that he’d spent $400 on a haircut on at least two occasions, but that pales in comparison to the crisis-level vanity of a botched facelift.
Because who are we kidding — John Kerry wasn’t exactly Rock Hudson to begin with, and now he looks like someone murdered the bottom half of his face and it’s taken on that weird postmortem bloat that you see when TV detectives fish a body out of the river.
And, did he think no one would notice? HE WAS THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE FOR PRESIDENT LESS THAN TEN YEARS AGO. For an 18-month period he was one of the five most famous people on Planet Earth.
The media blackout on this issue hasn’t been total — the Washington Post allowed a piece on it in its blog section, and when asked about Kerry’s face his spokesperson denied any surgery and claimed Kerry looked like an Easter Island monument because he’s been working so hard.
Obviously, that’s a lie — and a terrible one at that. If a person’s face can be altered by working too hard, Oprah Winfrey would look like Rocky Dennis by now. If you can’t even think up a good lie to answer a question you can’t possibly not know was coming, what good are you going to be at the negotiating table with the likes of Vladimir Putin?
It’s worth noting that three of our last four Secretaries of State were women — Madeleine Albright, Condoleeza Rice, and Hillary Clinton — and that none of them ever showed a fraction of the vanity that drove Kerry to turn himself into a human Jack-O-Lantern.
I voted for John Kerry in 2004 — I would have voted for a traffic cone if it had been the only alternative to George W. Bush — and while I won’t say I’m exactly relieved that he didn’t become president (because, again, George W. Bush), it is a bit alarming to imagine a president with a botched facelift. Although, I’m sure one day we’ll have one. (My money’s on Clay Aiken.)
The 2004 campaign also provides clues to what exactly is going on with Kerry’s face. You’ll surely remember that the thrust of Kerry’s campaign was to get us out of the war in Iraq that Bush so stupidly started — Kerry’s record as a decorated Vietnam veteran gave him the moral high ground to argue that unlike Bush, he understood the horrors of war and would only commit troops when absolutely vital to U.S. interests.
Now that he’s arguing even more vociferously than John McCain for a strike on Syria (which poses zero threat to any U.S. interest), it seems maybe Kerry has had some kind of change of heart. PERHAPS LITERALLY.
Don’t you see? John Kerry looks like he’s wearing a John Kerry mask because he is wearing a John Kerry mask! HE’S NOT JOHN KERRY AT ALL, but some kind of neocon (or possibly a space alien) wearing an (admittedly crude) facsimile of Kerry’s face over his own! You can see it in his eyes, darting back and forth behind those little slits in the latex.
So get in there and start asking the tough questions, Media! How did a lizard-like neocon space alien in a John Kerry mask get to the top of the State Department?! Is it Dick Cheney in there? It is, isn’t it? Blink once for yes.