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[JCS]

Realmente, venha o diabo e escolha porque pelos vistos esse Kerry também não vale muita coisa...

JCS

[Thomas Hobbes]

Realmente só um tolo consegue perder as eleições para um tolo que ninguem lá quer.

Mas dois meses de campanha ainda dá para mudar muita coisa.

Só resta esperar que O Bushinho seja apanhado na curva

[Alfred E. Neuman]

Por incrivel que pareça, cada vez mais, estou convencido que vai ser o Bush Jr. a ganhar as eleições.



Sun, September 12, 2004

Who's the moron?

John Kerry may have talked his way out of the U.S. presidency

By Lorrie Goldstein


Clearly, it's going to take a moron to lose the November presidential election to George W. Bush. And it's looking more and more like John Kerry is up to the job.

It's not just that Kerry -- as Bush himself might put it -- has "mis-underestimated" the Republican president.

It's that if Bush is a moron, as the Democrats keep insisting, then Kerry is proving to be an even bigger one.

Consider: By bragging too much about his admirable service in the Vietnam war, Kerry has moronically allowed himself to be placed on the defensive over his combat record. By who?

By Bush, the self-described "war president" who protected Americans from the Viet Cong by flying fighter jets over Texas during Vietnam. Rather occasionally, as it turns out.

Kerry should have let others speak to his heroism in war instead of making it the centrepiece of his campaign and when attacked by the Bushites, pointed out the simple reality that when his country called, he went to Vietnam and Bush went to Texas.


Lack of judgment


How Kerry managed to turn what should have been a huge plus for him -- insofar as anyone cares about what either man did during Vietnam -- doesn't say much for his judgment.

Nor does Kerry's ever-changing stand on the war in Iraq.

Kerry returned from the Vietnam war to denounce it as a colossal blunder and a huge moral error.

While his statements at the time understandably upset many Vietnam vets who resented, and still do, Kerry's unfair portrayal of them as baby killers -- history, in retrospect, has proven Kerry right. Vietnam was a mistake, certainly a view widely held by those inclined to vote Democratic in the first place.

That Kerry was too dense to realize that this was precisely the ground he should have staked out with regard to the war in Iraq doesn't speak well of him. Rightly or wrongly, the vast majority of voters who will be supporting Kerry believe that Bush:

(a) either lied or blundered his way into a war against Iraq in which 1,000 U.S. soldiers have died while no weapons of mass destruction or operational links to al-Qaida have been found.

(b) that far from making America safer from Islamic terrorism, Bush has made it less safe, with Iraq not only having become an incubator for terrorism, but a rallying cry for it.

(c) that Bush, through his huge tax cut aimed mainly at the rich, combined with an orgy of military spending on a misguided war, has not only plunged the U.S. economy from a healthy surplus into deficit, but cost millions of American jobs.

Given all this, you'd think that a smart guy like Kerry -- and the Democrats keep telling us how smart he is -- would have known enough to come out against the Iraq war. Or, more accurately, to admit that, in retrospect, his original Congressional vote authorizing Bush to go to war was a mistake. This would have energized the Democrats and rallied their natural constituency given the doubts millions of Americans now have about Iraq.

But what did Kerry do instead? When directly challenged by Bush -- the moron -- on whether he would have supported the war based on what we now know Kerry -- the self-described complex thinker -- walked right into Bush's trap and said "yes."

Incredible. The presidential nominee of the Democratic party -- which argues that Bush was at best a fool and at worst a liar on Iraq -- basically said he agreed with Bush on Iraq. Kerry's campaign has been floundering ever since with voters clearly and understandably confused over just what it is Kerry really believes.


Nothing new


Then again, sending out confused political signals is nothing new for Kerry, whose entire career in the Senate seems to have been mostly about trying to be all things to all people. For example, having voted in favour of the Iraq war, Kerry later voted against giving Bush the money to pay for it, after first proposing an unsuccessful amendment to tax the rich to raise the $87 billion required.

That led to Kerry's now-infamous statement that: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

Last week, Kerry did another back flip when he said that the Iraq war -- for which he had previously declared his support, even with the benefit of hindsight -- was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." That's what he should have said in the first place, if he believed it. Now it looks like he's saying whatever he thinks will get him votes, or whatever he's told. Moron.