Ahhh...Kerry evokes revolutionary imagery to continue the Big Lie and gloss over his weaknesses by adding a rhetorical layer of military/patriotic sheen.
...at a 7:30 a.m. rally on the shores of Boston Harbor — less than nine hours after Kerry finished his acceptance speech.Kerry also employed Paul Revere's midnight run and imagery of Bunker Hill to bash President Bush over U.S. intelligence failures.
"One if by land, two if by sea, and the message was right. Come to think of it, they had better intelligence than we do today about what's going on," Kerry continued, drawing the loudest applause of the event.
As fifth graders attending private schools and American history buffs know, Kerry’s "Bush mislead" construct fails once you know the context of the signal lights.
In the spring of 1775, most of the Massachusetts Patriot leaders had taken refuge in outlying communities, fearing arrest at British roadblocks. The Brits were hard on the heels of Samuel Adams. Benjamin Church and Joseph Warren remained in Boston, serving as the group’s leader in Samuel Adams' absence. Paul Revere, a trusted messenger, also stayed in the city, tended his business interests and as unobtrusively as possible kept an eye on the soldiers stationed in the city.
What happened next would not have met Kerry's "hard Proof" criteria.
Revere became suspicious in mid-April when he noticed that British landing craft were being drawn out of the water for repairs — a clear indication that something was afoot. On the 16th he made a trip to Concord, a key community because it was the temporary home of the Provincial Congress and also a storehouse for militia guns, powder and shot. He warned the residents there that redcoats were likely to be dispatched in the near future to seize the town’s arms supply.
On his return home, Revere met with Patriot leaders in Charlestown and agreed on a plan to provide notice about the route the British would take to reach Concord. Revere agreed to arrange for the placement of signal lanterns in the belfry of Old North Church where they could easily been seen across the Charles River. If one lantern were displayed, the British would be advancing by land over the Boston Neck, then north and west to Concord. If two lanterns were hung, the redcoats would have chosen to cross the Charles by boat to Cambridge, then west to their target.
The problem with Kerry's analogy is that the lamp signal called into action a plan for a pre-emptive strike against the Brits by the Lexington Company of Militia (aka the Minutemen) on the town common. It was a general alarm, not an alarm of an imminent threat. The Patriots could have stayed in their homes, and hoped the King would tire of the rebellion as he had bigger poisson to fry, that he might remove his boot from the colony's neck, eventually.
They chose on this night and in this place, to Bring It On.
Under Kerry's proffered rules of Intel and engagement the Minutemen would not have been called to arms without hard evidence of a threat; troops moving wouldn't be enough, and the "shot heard around the world" wouldn't have been fired at Lexington on April 19, 1775 and we'd be speaking the Queen's English or worse: French.