01 Mar 2004 Mint Julep Heinz Kerry, by Murdock “Doc” Gibbs

I call it selective liberal outrage.

Listen to any evening newscast and you hear liberals spouting verbal assaults and vicious attacks on anything conservative. They are trashing anyone with even a remote association with an exclusive golf club or connection to any corporate power structure.

You’ve heard them – it’s people such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Howard Dean, Michael Moore and the Hollywood crowd. But have you noticed how the trash traffic comes to an embarrassing stop when it comes to criticizing one of their own?

Look at Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of presidential contender John Kerry. She is the multimillion-dollar heiress to the Heinz fortune. Might I also add that she’s African-American? In this day of “political correctness,” when that term has become synonymous with black people, hold the phone! Teresa Kerry is a white African-American. She grew up in Africa. Liberal blacks anointed Bill Clinton as the first black president, and now Mrs. Kerry could be the first African-American first lady.

My question is, why don’t liberals inflict the same verbal battering on Teresa Heinz Kerry as they would on a conservative from a similar background? Regardless of the niceties we have heard about her – her philanthropy, her dedication to the environment and her adherence to all causes liberal – it’s apparent that if she were a conservative (say, Laura Bush), her past would be the subject of intense, merciless and mean-spirited scrutiny.

A recent Time magazine states that Mrs. Heinz Kerry – or Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry – grew up in Mozambique. The daughter of a Portuguese doctor, “she was part of a pampered colonial class, playing tennis on the grass lawns of private clubs and spending her days sipping tea and coffee with her friends.” Wasn’t it the Portuguese who first brought blacks as slaves to America?

And, just look at her now – a millionaire heiress, flying around in that splashy ketchup-red and white corporate jet, complete with the Heinz number (“57”) on the back. How can such a lady claim to relate to average folk?

I wonder what Heinz pays those tomato-pickers anyway?

Heinz Kerry grew up in the very cradle of racism and white privilege in Africa, living like royalty. Her family was part of a culture that subjugated Africans, stole their land and relegated them to servitude and disdain as she enjoyed the many benefits of a “pampered colonial class.” She went on to study in apartheid-ruled South Africa.

Picture her living as a little rich girl would – like Shirley Temple – gazing over her balcony, sadly pouting as she moans the conditions of the “coloreds” all around her, watching these tired, downtrodden people retire to their shanties. As dusk falls, imagine her final request for the evening: “Bring me another tea, Mbutu….”

What despicable diatribes would fall on Teresa Heinz Kerry if she were a conservative. All the liberal camps would pile on: the NAACP, comedians like Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg, MoveOn.org, primetime network newsmen with their tell-tale raised eyebrows and skeptical smirks, the Democratic National Committee and the Congressional Black Caucus. “How dare she call herself an African-American!”

It would be a bloodbath… if she were a conservative. George W. Bush’s National Guard record of 30 years ago would have to take the back seat of the bus as the Left launched this blitz on this woman of the “pampered colonial class”… if she were a conservative.

But Teresa Heinz Kerry is not a conservative. In fact, she recently said, “This [Bush] administration is the most cynical, the most venal, the most Machiavellian administration in my 32 years in Washington.” And, regardless of her pampered past, the liberals will give her a smooth ride as her husband campaigns to take the White House.

“Mbutu, forget the tea. Make it a mint julep.”