Posted on 09/23/2004 11:48:14 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
...Here's the best indication that Kerry has finally decided to drive a stake in the ground on Iraq. Kerry's campaign knew that, in response to Kerry's speech, the Bush-Cheney team would immediately redouble its assault on Kerry as an inveterate flip-flopper.
The candidate, however, waved away those concerns.
"I don't care. I am not going to sit and listen to Bush not face reality," Kerry said, according to one adviser.
To be sure, another GOP accusation of expediency is hardly the only peril. One national strategist, noting that President Bush currently enjoys a strong lead when voters are asked who can better handle Iraq, puts the danger succintly: "Pumping air into an issue you lose by 18 points is very risky."
And yet, the Iraq war is a matter that is impossible to sidestep or finesse.
And with his new stance, Kerry has taken a position that should allow him to offer a more compelling counterpoint to Bush's foreign policy.
"This is a go-for-broke moment," says the strategist. "They may have decided they have no choice."....
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
What better title can you have for an article about flip-flop Kerry: A Turning Point for Kerry?
Every day marks a point where he turns. He never stops turning. If he stood still for any length of time, people would notice that there is nothing there. Just an empty suit.
Keep turning, Kerry. Keep spinning. Keep sinking.
(And, Mr. Kerry, I really want to congratulate you on letting the Hillary for 2008 campaign team set up in your headquarters and contribute to your non-campaign. What a stroke of brilliance.)
Don't they realize that the debates are more about likability than substance. Bush wins on either count anyway, but the people who are voting based on policy have mostly made their decision I think.
50% find Kerry likeable? Where are they finding these people?
***…..If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?
What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.
…… (Clarence) Thomas' real crime, as everybody knew but was too intimidated by the hysteria to confirm at the time, was his commitment to constitutional principles they hated. They hated these principles because the Constitution was written for the explicit purpose of preventing the realization of their socialist and egalitarian dreams.
……Their cynicism flows from the very perception they have of right and wrong. They do it for higher ends. They do it for the progressive faith. They do it because they see themselves as having the power to redeem the world from evil. It is that terrifyingly exalted ambition that fuels their spiritual arrogance and justifies their sordid and, if necessary, criminal means.
And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.
Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left-by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints…..*** Source
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(CBS run article March 2004) Kerry's World: Father Knows Best
[Excerpts]
Father [Richard Kerry]***….. "Americans," he writes, "are inclined to see the world and foreign affairs in black and white." They celebrate their own form of government and denigrate all others, making them guilty of what he calls "ethnocentric accommodation -- everyone ought to be like us." As a result, America has committed the "fatal error" of "propagating democracy" and fallen prey to "the siren's song of promoting human rights," falsely assuming that our values and institutions are a good fit in the Third World. And, just as Americans exaggerate their own goodness, they exaggerate their enemies' badness. The Soviet Union wasn't nearly as imperialistic as American politicians warned, Kerry argues. "Seeing the Soviet Union as the aggressor in every instance, and the U.S. as only reacting defensively, relieves an American observer from the need to see any parallel between our use of military power in distant parts of the world, and the Soviet use of military power outside the Soviet Union," he writes. He further claims that "Third world Marxist movements were autonomous national movements" -- outside Moscow's orbit. The book culminates in a plea for a hardheaded, realist foreign policy that removes any pretense of U.S. moral superiority……***
Son [John Kerry] ***…..From the start, Richard Kerry turned his oldest son into his foreign policy protégé. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas has written, "The Kerry dinner table was a nightly foreign-policy seminar. While other boys were eating TV dinners in front of the tube, [John] Kerry was discussing George Kennan's doctrine of containment." His father introduced the adolescent boy to such luminaries as Monnet and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Later, when he was at Yale, John Kerry traded letters with Clementine Churchill, Winston's wife.
As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning, "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism."
….. When John Kerry came back from Vietnam, his father pushed him to be more outspoken in his opposition to the war. "When Kerry refused to speak out against the government [while in uniform], suddenly his father felt like he was being a wimp," says Brinkley. "[So he] encouraged his son to take off the uniform and to become a critic."
John Kerry, of course, did exactly this, first in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and eventually in the U.S. Senate. From the moment he arrived in Washington, Kerry promised that "issues of war and peace" would remain his passion. And, from the start, this meant that he would criticize Ronald Reagan's war against communism, especially when it was fought through proxies in the jungles of Central America. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandanista government, telling The Washington Post, "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell [the Sandinistas] what to do." Soon after his return, he pressured Congress into investigating the administration's illegal funding of the Contra rebels, opening a trail that culminated in the exposure of the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. And, a few years later, in the late '80s, he repeated this success, launching an investigation that revealed that another of the administration's favorite anti-communists, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, had been deeply enmeshed in drug-trafficking. Kerry was also skeptical enough of U.S. power that he voted against authorizing a popular intervention -- the Gulf war -- and opposed a 1995 resolution that would have allowed the arming of Bosnians…..***
But when all is said and done, does Kerry have a stab at earning your vote?
That's bogus.
Exactly!
He spins like a top.
What can they do now? Ha!
I think Lady Macbeth is worried that hubby is going to be too sick to help her out. As much as thinking people despise him, Bubba is still the friendly face on the team and holds a good share of the power. If he is dead or sickly, she is far more wobbly. This is not the Byzantine Empire where the wife had equal claims to the purple.
Someone said wisely that Kerry's campaign showed its fatal downtown when they went to Clinton's bedside for help, when the bypass was barely finished. Not a good sign!
I also think Kerry is showing signs of major physical distress and emotional fatigue. He seems to be self-destructing, not merely running a bad campaign.
In a year that the MSM is blatantly partisan, the Boston Globe stands out as shameless. They have become the official mouthpiece of the Kerry campaign. It's not just the columnists. In is in nearly every story on the campaign. It's become a joke.
ALTHOUGH ROLAND Merullo makes interesting points about the differences between liberals and conservatives, he lapses into liberal-biased stereotypes ("A puzzling America," op ed, Sept. 20). He contrasts liberals to conservatives by noting that liberals appreciate life's gray areas, implying that conservatives do not.
This is a stereotype that is commonly encountered in elite circles: the conservative as a dim-witted, unenlightened, self-interested, self-righteous boor.
The simple fact is that it is possible to perceive issues in all their complexity and still be firm in one's judgment and plan. Even in a highly complicated case, a surgeon must make a firm judgment as to whether he should operate or not. His ability to do so does not imply that he fails to see the case in all its complexity.
Like Ronald Reagan before him, George Bush does not lack perception; he simply understands leadership.
ROBERT J. PETRELLA
Chestnut Hill
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2004/09/24/a_liberals_stereotyping_of_conservatives/
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That Letter to the Editor reminded me of what Kelly Ann said on Fox News: Women like complex men with simple ideas not simple men with complex ideas. The discussion was about why women were moving toward Bush.
The Boston Globies must really get excited every time they watch reruns of THE DAWN OF THE DEAD.
Yeah, Walter Mitty is going to give us a lesson in reality.
Some have called him a Boston Brahmin, though that would only be by an earlier marriage it seems.
He could be more appropriately be called a Boston Dervish. No wonder he sympathizes so with the other side.
That is to say, its what I would advise him to do if I were on his team. I would tell him he has to take off the gloves and go after Iraq being a mess. I'd tell him now is the time to become Howard Dean minus the kook factor (hard to do, I know).
I doubt (and pray) it will work since he's such an obvious flipper. OTOH, the sheeple have short memories, and they're easily manipulated. So, if he does like he did 2 or 3 days ago in that speech before the Nat'l Guard, he stands a better chance than before.
Still, I pray it won't help him.
It isn't good when you have to choose from your least worst options.
he's still lost in the fog of war in Vietnam...he's still fighting "nixon's" war in his mind.
"This is a go-for-broke moment," says the strategist. "They may have decided they have no choice."....
Kerry is just being himself. His current stand is the same as the one he took in 1971 and I believe his thinking is, if he is going to get beat, he is going to get beat on positions in which he believes.
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