The centerpiece of Kerry's latest campaign theme "Strong At Home" is to call into question Bush's judgement on Iraq. Kerry said today: "Bush's mistakes, Kerry said, "were not the equivalent of accounting errors. They were colossal failures of judgment — and judgment is what we look for in a president."
Yes indeedy, unfortunately the more Kerry speaks of war the more his own flawed judgement comes to the forefront, as Mark Steyn points out:
In the usual course of events, Kerry's terrible judgment in the '70s would render him unelectable. Instead, over two decades he morphed into a respectably dull run-of-the-mill pompous senatorial windbag. Had he run for president in the '90s or 2000, he might even have pulled it off. But the Democrats turned to him this time because the tortured contradictions of his resume suited an anti-war party that didn't dare run as such. Ever since the first cries of ''Quagmire!'' back in the early days of the Afghan liberation in 2001, the left have been trying to Vietnamize the war on terror. They failed in that, but they succeeded in the Vietnamization of the election campaign, and that's turned out just swell, hasn't it? Remember that formulation a lot of Democrats were using last year? They oppose the war but ''of course'' they support our troops. Kerry's campaign is a walking illustration of the deficiencies of that straddle: When you divorce the heroism of soldiering from the justice of the cause, what's left but a hollow braggart?The Vietnamese government used Kerry's 1971 testimony as evidence of American war crimes as recently as two months ago. In Aden, Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be, but in Hanoi Kerry's psychodrama-queen performance is a gift that keeps on giving. It would be a shame if they understood him more clearly than the American people do.
That Kerry cannot find his footing six weeks from the election is that Kerry is simply not believeable as CINC. InstaPunk points out:
It may be understandable if unacceptable that the Michael Moores of the nation forget that George W. Bush is our commander-in-chief in a time of war. There is no excuse for John Kerry to forget it. He is aspiring to be commander-in-chief. If he does not respect the office, he is not qualified to fill it.There is no excuse for a presidential candidate to declare that the sitting President is "unfit for command" when American troops are in the field. There is no excuse for a presidential candidate to suggest that a draft status 30 years in the past has any bearing on the qualifications of a sitting president who has already served four years as commander-in-chief and has exposed himself to personal peril on multiple occasions. There is no excuse for a presidential candidate to imply that a sitting president is a coward when the office he is competing for has a 9-percent assassination rate and an 11-percent casualty rate. There is no excuse for a presidential candidate to undermine the perceived honor and integrity of the commander-in-chief in a time of war.
There are honorable ways of debating the alternatives in Iraq and in the War on Terror. But only a patriot would think to discover those ways in the poisonous world John Kerry helped bring into being thirty-some years ago.
Read the rest of InstaPunk's fisking as he enummerates the reasons Kerry's anti-war activism resonates stronger than his feckless conversion to hawk. Campaign re-tooling, focus-grouping, ring-knocking or ernest thundering from the podium cannot not disguise that John Kerry is running from John Kerry, not against George Bush.
Posted by feste at September 20, 2004 11:28 AM | TrackBack