In 1986 P. J. O’Rourke encountered John Effin’ Kerry in the Philippines, during then-dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ infamously corrupt “snap election.” P. J. says Kerry hasn’t changed a bit since then; he’s still a real jerk.

From the article O’Rourke did for Rolling Stone:

Most of the Potomac Parakeets were a big disappointment. Massachusetts senator John Kerry was a founding member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but he was a bath toy in this fray.

On Sunday night, two days after the election, thirty of the computer operators from COMELEC [the Philippine government “Commission on Elections,” appointed by Marcos and in charge of compiling the final vote tally] walked off the job, protesting that the vote figures were being juggled. Aquino supporters and NAMFREL volunteers took the operators, most of them young women, to a church, and hundreds of people formed a protective barrier around them. [NAMFREL—The National Movement for Free Elections—was supposedly nonpartisan, but NAMFREL members were strongly anti-Marcos.]

Village Voice reporter Joe Conason and I had been tipped off about the walkout, and when we got to the church, we found Bea Zobel, one of Cory Aquino’s top aides, in a tizzy. “The women are terrified,” she said. “They’re scared to go home. They don’t know what to do. We don’t know what to do.” Joe and I suggested that Mrs. Zobel go to the Manila Hotel and bring back some members of the Congressional observer team. She came back with Kerry, who did nothing.

Kerry later said that he didn’t talk to the COMELEC employees then because he wasn’t allowed to. [A bone-head Rolling Stone fact-checker sent the article to Kerry’s Senate office for comment. Kerry staffers were wroth and insisted the senator’s version of events be included.] This is ridiculous. He was ushered into an area that had been cordoned off from the press and the crowd and where the computer operators were sitting. To talk to the women, all he would have had to do was raise his voice. Why he was reluctant, I can’t tell you. I can tell you what any red-blooded representative of the U.S. Government should have done. He should have shouted, “If you’re frightened for your safety, I’ll take you to the American embassy, and damn the man who tries to stop me.” But all Kerry did was walk around like a male model in a concerned and thoughtful pose.

Read the whole thing. It gets even worse.