Kerry Unplugged
The Times Magazine's piece Kerry's Undeclared War is an incredibly long advertisement for Kerry. It is also incredibly enlightening if you can stomach the read. Whether you read it or not, I highly recommend the observations of these fine analysts:LGF focuses on Kerry's Undeclared Policies:
Reading the article gives you a very good picture of John Kerry—empty, driven by political winds, and utterly bereft of ideas except a desperate, naïve hope that by rehashing failed policies of the Carter administration (bilateral talks with North Korea? more money for Hosni Mubarak?) he can bamboozle the public into electing him.Hugh Hewitt has a few thoughts:
...Kerry's declaration that frontal assaults on territory occupied by the enemy are not part of the GWOT is at best surreal. What a naive view of the war. The GWOT has many aspects, and it already has had many fierce battles, equal in intensity though not American loss of life to Iwo Jima. In fact, it is hard to square Kerry's repeated condemnation of Bush Administration tactics at Tora Bora with Kerry's rejection of Iwo Jima-like battles in the current war. Kerry's understanding of the war is, in a word, incoherent, but no doubt welcome in places like Teheran and Damascus as it appears to rule out any future major battles no matter what those states do or which terrorists they support.Roger Simon thinks Kerry is The Ultimate Conservative:And his candidacy is doomed as a result. A nuisance, for which no Iwo Jimas will be necessary. What a maroon.
Kerry is something else. He is the Ultimate Conservative - not in politics, mind you, but in temperament. He is the man of the status quo par excellence. Nothing changes or should change in the World According to Kerry. All this talk of nuance is simply a mask for stasis. These "subtleties" of thought are almost never original, merely idea rotation for its own sake, going nowhere and deliberately so. The real(motivating) idea is not to move. No wonder he is so appealing to the solons of the Mainstream Media who benefit so greatly by this status quo. The problem is - the status quo these days is death.Power Line talks about Senator Kerry's G-8 spot:
Mutatis mutandis, John Kerry promises a restoration of the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter -- the looming presence left unmentioned in the Bai article.Read 'em all.We saw a preview of the futility of Carterism in the face Islamism in the Iranian hostage crisis that terminated the Carter presidency. For those who learn from experience, the case for Carterism is even less compelling in 2004 than it was in 1980. Kerry's resurrection of Carterism in the face of the Islamist war against America would indeed alter the perception of us very, very quickly, although I fear we would not be around long enough to appreciate it fully.
Update: The Volokh Conspiracy makes an analogy about analogies. Very well put.
Blog post #3842 in category
Kerry '04
posted 10 October 04