Kerry-go-round still twirling
I didn't think John Kerry could suddenly manifest the mental discipline to focus his campaign on one or a few issues instead of flailingly grasping at whatever piece of PR flotsam happened to float up in the daily news cycle. Here is still more proof.
"Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, citing the war in Iraq and other trouble spots in the world, raised the possibility Wednesday that a military draft could be reinstated if voters re-elect President Bush. Kerry said he would not bring back the draft and questioned how fairly it was administered in the past.
"Answering a question about the draft that had been posed at a forum with voters, Kerry said: 'If George Bush were to be re-elected, given the way he has gone about this war and given his avoidance of responsibility in North Korea and Iran and other places, is it possible? I can't tell you.'"
Leaving aside the "avoidance of responsibility" crack, which makes no sense based upon Kerry's own open endorsement of appeasing both rogue powers, the fact of the matter is that the only proposal on any "table" to reinstate a military draft is the one forwarded by House Democrats such as Charlie Rangel and "Baghdad Jim" McDermott. And that was nothing more than an amateurish publicity stunt intended to embarrass the Bush White House. As the AP story goes on to say, "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials have been asked numerous times whether they thought a draft would be necessary to maintain force levels in Iraq. They have said consistently that they think it is neither necessary nor desirable, since today's military is built on volunteer service and professionalism."
As you might have suspected, Kerry's was not a lone, crazed voice. He was simply - again- echoing...Howard Dean!
"Former Kerry rival Howard Dean, now traveling the country to drum up support for Kerry and raise money for Democratic candidates, said last week at Brown University in Providence, R.I., 'I think that George Bush is certainly going to have a draft if he goes into a second term, and any young person that doesn't want to go to Iraq might think twice about voting for him.'"
Senator Demented, Dr. Demented, Max(imally) Demented - is there anybody in that party not in need of a visit from the men with the white coats?
{epiphany hits, smacking forehead in "I coulda had a V-8!" fashion}
Oh, wait, I get it - this is part of the "all Iraq, all the time" angle. Or, rather, "Iraq is another Vietnam." Or, rather, "We already lost the Iraq issue on the merits, just like every other issue, foreign and domestic, so let's gin up a bunch more lies to scare the piss out of the younger voters who are lining up to support George Bush in droves." The phantom draft fits in right alongside "Medicare cuts," "Republicans want to starve school children," "Republicans want to make Grandma beg for Alpo in a snowbank without her IV tube by taking away her Social Security," "Republicans want to kill everybody with pestilence and filth so their greedy corporate fatcat robber baron sons of [imaginative combination of four- and twelve-letter words] can enhance their putting greens with the skeletons, skins, and lesser internal organs of the poor and downtrodden," and "Dick Cheney's head rotates around and his mouth spews ectoplasm when you say 'Halliburton'" in the Democrat fearmongering hall of fame.
Well, Lurch's vaunted Iraq tour-de-force on Monday really didn't amount to much more than riding along on the President's coattails (other than his "Old Europe will save us so we can withdraw" fantasies). And it didn't generate much, if any, buzz. Perhaps the next step is an announcement that Kerry is going back in time to challenge Richard Nixon instead.
Maybe the blogosphere should start taking bets on how long it will be until Kerry does the "Dean scream."
~~~~~~
This'll make for a longer post, but it fits under the same topic.
At a press conference yesterday (which, unsurprisingly, included no questions about his campaign's connections to and involvement with the Rathergate scandal), the Boston Balker responded to the commonsensical conclusion, drawn by the President, that if Kerry had had his way in the run-up to the war - "waiting long enough to allow inspectors to reveal that Saddam Hussein had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons [it was twelve years and counting, actually, but I digress...]" — the Iraqi dictator would still be in power, with the following:
"If you don't have weapons of mass destruction, believe me, Saddam Hussein is a very different person," Mr. Kerry said. "That's what kept him power. And I believe Saddam Hussein would not be in power."
{Scratching head} {Scratching head again} Nope, I still can't make sense of that statement.
Kerry claims that WMDs kept Saddam in power. Saddam ruled Iraq for a quarter-century. Did he have WMDs throughout his tenure? If so, would that not include the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom? And if so, would that not justify our invasion, as well as Kerry's original vote to authorize it, on those grounds, and undermine the Deaniacal anti-war pose he's trying to strike now?
Indeed, his argument logically presupposes that Saddam maintained WMD arsenals throughout the multi-year UN weapons inspection regime. Which means that giving more time to still more inspections that were, by definition, going to fail would have accomplished nothing other than to maintain Saddam's power along with his WMDs.
If, on the other hand, one assumes the previous Dem premise that Saddam did not and never did possess WMDs and that the very suggestion that he did was nothing but a "Bush lie" - which Kerry's newest claim implicitly contradicts - then one has to conclude that he was still, somehow, able to maintain his power for a quarter-century without them. Yet this directly contradicts Kerry's suggesting that WMDs were the only thing keeping him in power.
When you really think about it, dictatorships long pre-date the advent of WMDs. How did, say, Napoleon Bonaparte rule most of Europe for over a decade a hundred years before the advent of chemical and biological weapons, and nearly a century and a half before Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki? For that matter, how did Adolph Hitler take over Germany and conquer Europe and a goodly chunk of Africa without nuclear weapons or a willingness to use chemical weapons even on the Eastern front? And how many contemporary dictatorships are there around the world that do not possess WMDs? Seems like there have to be at least a few.
Yes, I realize that I took four paragraphs to say that Kerry stepped on another rhetorical rake. Which is why he usually sticks to his stump speech, and why he's been avoiding the press so much the past couple of months. Every time he freelances he, you should pardon the expression, poops his pants.
But, naturally, he couldn't stop there. Senator Sphincter-Mouth couldn't resist addressing the perception that his vote to give Mr. Bush the authorization to invade Iraq and his recent declaration that it was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" are inconsistent.
"The vote for authorization is interpreted by a lot of people as a vote to go to war," Kerry said.
Including by Kerry himself at the time, it bears mentioning.
"It wasn't a vote to go that day."
And we didn't - we dicked around with the UN and Hans Blix' gerbil patrol in their little white Tonka trucks putting around the Mesopotamian desert hardpan for five more months before finally doing what should have been done years before.
"It was a vote to go through the process of going to the U.N., building the allies and then making a judgment of whether we had to go."
See the "dicked around for five more months" comment above. How much more time were we supposed to waste?
"I believe there was a better judgment to make, and I said so all along."
Judging by this campaign, in Kerry's mind there were all kinds of "better judgments to make." And he would have made all of them.
One other Kerry Iraq comment from yesterday:
"Why are our troops facing more terrorists today than they ever were before? And even Secretary Powell has admitted that, that Iraq has become the magnet for terrorists."
1) Our troops are facing more terrorists today in Iraq because Syria and Iran are pouring more of them into the country, counting on people like John Kerry to do precisely what they're doing - calling on us to abandon Iraq to the terrorists.
2) Iraq already was a "magnet for terrorists" under Saddam. The difference is, then they came to Iraq for training, arming, and financing. Now they're coming there to try to regain what we took from them a year ago.
And if John Kerry gets his way, they'll succeed. And then America will once more become that "magnet."
And that is why John Kerry will not get his way.
"Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, citing the war in Iraq and other trouble spots in the world, raised the possibility Wednesday that a military draft could be reinstated if voters re-elect President Bush. Kerry said he would not bring back the draft and questioned how fairly it was administered in the past.
"Answering a question about the draft that had been posed at a forum with voters, Kerry said: 'If George Bush were to be re-elected, given the way he has gone about this war and given his avoidance of responsibility in North Korea and Iran and other places, is it possible? I can't tell you.'"
Leaving aside the "avoidance of responsibility" crack, which makes no sense based upon Kerry's own open endorsement of appeasing both rogue powers, the fact of the matter is that the only proposal on any "table" to reinstate a military draft is the one forwarded by House Democrats such as Charlie Rangel and "Baghdad Jim" McDermott. And that was nothing more than an amateurish publicity stunt intended to embarrass the Bush White House. As the AP story goes on to say, "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials have been asked numerous times whether they thought a draft would be necessary to maintain force levels in Iraq. They have said consistently that they think it is neither necessary nor desirable, since today's military is built on volunteer service and professionalism."
As you might have suspected, Kerry's was not a lone, crazed voice. He was simply - again- echoing...Howard Dean!
"Former Kerry rival Howard Dean, now traveling the country to drum up support for Kerry and raise money for Democratic candidates, said last week at Brown University in Providence, R.I., 'I think that George Bush is certainly going to have a draft if he goes into a second term, and any young person that doesn't want to go to Iraq might think twice about voting for him.'"
Senator Demented, Dr. Demented, Max(imally) Demented - is there anybody in that party not in need of a visit from the men with the white coats?
{epiphany hits, smacking forehead in "I coulda had a V-8!" fashion}
Oh, wait, I get it - this is part of the "all Iraq, all the time" angle. Or, rather, "Iraq is another Vietnam." Or, rather, "We already lost the Iraq issue on the merits, just like every other issue, foreign and domestic, so let's gin up a bunch more lies to scare the piss out of the younger voters who are lining up to support George Bush in droves." The phantom draft fits in right alongside "Medicare cuts," "Republicans want to starve school children," "Republicans want to make Grandma beg for Alpo in a snowbank without her IV tube by taking away her Social Security," "Republicans want to kill everybody with pestilence and filth so their greedy corporate fatcat robber baron sons of [imaginative combination of four- and twelve-letter words] can enhance their putting greens with the skeletons, skins, and lesser internal organs of the poor and downtrodden," and "Dick Cheney's head rotates around and his mouth spews ectoplasm when you say 'Halliburton'" in the Democrat fearmongering hall of fame.
Well, Lurch's vaunted Iraq tour-de-force on Monday really didn't amount to much more than riding along on the President's coattails (other than his "Old Europe will save us so we can withdraw" fantasies). And it didn't generate much, if any, buzz. Perhaps the next step is an announcement that Kerry is going back in time to challenge Richard Nixon instead.
Maybe the blogosphere should start taking bets on how long it will be until Kerry does the "Dean scream."
~~~~~~
This'll make for a longer post, but it fits under the same topic.
At a press conference yesterday (which, unsurprisingly, included no questions about his campaign's connections to and involvement with the Rathergate scandal), the Boston Balker responded to the commonsensical conclusion, drawn by the President, that if Kerry had had his way in the run-up to the war - "waiting long enough to allow inspectors to reveal that Saddam Hussein had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons [it was twelve years and counting, actually, but I digress...]" — the Iraqi dictator would still be in power, with the following:
"If you don't have weapons of mass destruction, believe me, Saddam Hussein is a very different person," Mr. Kerry said. "That's what kept him power. And I believe Saddam Hussein would not be in power."
{Scratching head} {Scratching head again} Nope, I still can't make sense of that statement.
Kerry claims that WMDs kept Saddam in power. Saddam ruled Iraq for a quarter-century. Did he have WMDs throughout his tenure? If so, would that not include the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom? And if so, would that not justify our invasion, as well as Kerry's original vote to authorize it, on those grounds, and undermine the Deaniacal anti-war pose he's trying to strike now?
Indeed, his argument logically presupposes that Saddam maintained WMD arsenals throughout the multi-year UN weapons inspection regime. Which means that giving more time to still more inspections that were, by definition, going to fail would have accomplished nothing other than to maintain Saddam's power along with his WMDs.
If, on the other hand, one assumes the previous Dem premise that Saddam did not and never did possess WMDs and that the very suggestion that he did was nothing but a "Bush lie" - which Kerry's newest claim implicitly contradicts - then one has to conclude that he was still, somehow, able to maintain his power for a quarter-century without them. Yet this directly contradicts Kerry's suggesting that WMDs were the only thing keeping him in power.
When you really think about it, dictatorships long pre-date the advent of WMDs. How did, say, Napoleon Bonaparte rule most of Europe for over a decade a hundred years before the advent of chemical and biological weapons, and nearly a century and a half before Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki? For that matter, how did Adolph Hitler take over Germany and conquer Europe and a goodly chunk of Africa without nuclear weapons or a willingness to use chemical weapons even on the Eastern front? And how many contemporary dictatorships are there around the world that do not possess WMDs? Seems like there have to be at least a few.
Yes, I realize that I took four paragraphs to say that Kerry stepped on another rhetorical rake. Which is why he usually sticks to his stump speech, and why he's been avoiding the press so much the past couple of months. Every time he freelances he, you should pardon the expression, poops his pants.
But, naturally, he couldn't stop there. Senator Sphincter-Mouth couldn't resist addressing the perception that his vote to give Mr. Bush the authorization to invade Iraq and his recent declaration that it was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" are inconsistent.
"The vote for authorization is interpreted by a lot of people as a vote to go to war," Kerry said.
Including by Kerry himself at the time, it bears mentioning.
"It wasn't a vote to go that day."
And we didn't - we dicked around with the UN and Hans Blix' gerbil patrol in their little white Tonka trucks putting around the Mesopotamian desert hardpan for five more months before finally doing what should have been done years before.
"It was a vote to go through the process of going to the U.N., building the allies and then making a judgment of whether we had to go."
See the "dicked around for five more months" comment above. How much more time were we supposed to waste?
"I believe there was a better judgment to make, and I said so all along."
Judging by this campaign, in Kerry's mind there were all kinds of "better judgments to make." And he would have made all of them.
One other Kerry Iraq comment from yesterday:
"Why are our troops facing more terrorists today than they ever were before? And even Secretary Powell has admitted that, that Iraq has become the magnet for terrorists."
1) Our troops are facing more terrorists today in Iraq because Syria and Iran are pouring more of them into the country, counting on people like John Kerry to do precisely what they're doing - calling on us to abandon Iraq to the terrorists.
2) Iraq already was a "magnet for terrorists" under Saddam. The difference is, then they came to Iraq for training, arming, and financing. Now they're coming there to try to regain what we took from them a year ago.
And if John Kerry gets his way, they'll succeed. And then America will once more become that "magnet."
And that is why John Kerry will not get his way.
posted by JASmius at 4:03 PM
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