Who Does He Think He's Fooling?

A quote from Kerry's address to the National Guard in Las Vegas:

Kerry said, "I believe you deserve a president who isn't going to gild that truth, or gild our national security with politics, who is not going to ignore his own intelligence. . . ." The country deserves a president "who will give the American people the truth, not a fantasy world of spin," Kerry said.

Spin? No, surely not.

You know your campaign is in trouble when even the Arab press isn't buying your convention conversion to hawk.

Kerry was against US support for anti-Communist fighters in Central America and Afghanistan in the 1980s. In 1991 he voted against US participation in the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. In 2001 he was against military intervention in Afghanistan.

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The real Kerry’s brand of politics has won almost 60 percent of all elections in Western Europe since the mid-1940s. And, unless it is honestly presented to the American votes, we will not know how well or how badly it might do in the United States.

In despotic societies, dissimulation, always prompted by fear, is part of an individual’s self-defense mechanism. But what about democratic societies?

Should the fear of losing an election force a candidate into selling the electorate a bill of goods?

Kerry may yet win the election. But if he does he would know that he did so thanks to dissimulation. And that could put his presidency on the wrong track right from the start.