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July 30, 2004
Apocalypse Kerry
Posted by Dale Franks
Lawrence Kaplan, writing in The New Republic, savages Kerry's speech of last night.
Regarding his own Vietnam, as opposed to the Hollywood production staged around him, Kerry asked his audience "to judge me by my record." The question has been asked before, but Kerry did not answer it in his speech: If his Vietnam service offers proof that he is "decisive," then why is it that for two decades Kerry has been "only an average Senator," as pro-Kerry columnist Al Hunt wrote in yesterday's Wall Street Journal? If his wartime feats prove that Kerry is "strong" on national security, then why did he oppose virtually every stand-out weapons system in the U.S. arsenal today, speechify against the first Gulf War, and refuse to fund the second? Why, indeed, unless no correlation exists between his biography and his record?
Kerry's speech last night showed how much distance there is between the two...As for the candidate himself, he uttered nary a word about democracy promotion, nor even a banality or two about promoting freedom abroad. There was no heroism here. Only what Kerry defended as "complexity."
Indeed, he spent far more time discussing domestic policy than he spent discussing foreign and defense policy. And when he did get around to discussing the matter of our national survival, he basically took a page from the post-Vietnam playbook favored by an earlier generation of Democrats. "We shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad," the candidate declared to rousing applause, "and shutting them down in the United States of America." Suggesting that Europeans won't send troops to Iraq simply because they can't stand his opponent, Kerry promised to be nicer to our allies so we could "bring our troops home." Unlike, say, in Bosnia, he pledged to go to war "only because we have to." Leaving unsaid exactly by whom and at what cost, he dedicated himself to making America "respected in the world." Finally, and without saying precisely what it is, Kerry said he knows "what we have to do in Iraq." He has a plan, you see. Just like a candidate from long ago claimed to have a plan to end a war--the war that put Kerry on the stage last night and which, for him at least, wasn't so long ago at all.
This analysis, coming, as it does, from the nation's premier center-left publication, is just brutal.
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