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Monday, February 23, 2004
posted by gbarto at 10:29 PM:
Poor John Kerry, according to Fox News, his feelings have been wounded:Kerry: Voting Record Critics Attacking My Patriotism
It's worse than that, Johnny-Boy. They're attacking your judgments. The question, frankly, is not whether John Kerry is patriotic enough to be president, but whether - let's whisper this part - his experiences fighting Democrat wars left him too scarred to appreciate the military with whose leadership he would be charged and put past wounds aside to realistically consider both that military's needs and when it needed to be used.
John Kerry is a man who was hard-pressed to find a Communist threat he couldn't laugh off during the Reagan era. When Ronald Reagan was offering peace through strength, John Kerry was hanging out with Eddie Boland's capitulation crowd, eager to leave Nicaragua to the Communists if only out of spite for the Gipper.
In the War on Terror, John Kerry initially cast the right votes, but his antipathy toward American power abroad has resurfaced, reinforced by the liberal circles in which he moves. The problem is not that John Kerry is anti-American, but that his experiences in Vietnam left him too skeptical of the projection of American power to serve as our Head of State. A President must not look upon the military as a rogue element, but as an institution he leads. He must be prepared to direct that institution toward useful purposes. He must recognize in his nation's strengths the ability to make his nation stronger and the world better. With nearly twenty years in elective office, John Kerry has a particularly undistinguished record of showing the imaginative vision needed if one is to actually command American power and not merely critique it.
Fighting the war that another JFK started and LBJ ramped up soured Kerry on American power. Two decades in elective office in Massachussetts dulled whatever sense he might have had of how to transform the institution he feels so badly served him. Health care and other government programs are great fun to tinker with while in the Senate, but the President doesn't get to take a 20-year time-out figuring out how he feels about having the most powerful military in the world at his disposal. As President Bush found out on 9/11, the most placid-seeming world can drop things on your doorstep that require immediate responses based on the best understanding of the world that you've been able to form. Like it or lump it, Bush has his understanding of the world and was able to move swiftly to react to a changing world based on that general understanding. Two and a half years on, John Kerry is still dithering, claiming to have voted for a measure he opposed to show that he was in support, if I understood the latest explanation of his Iraq vote correctly. That's fine and good for a domestic pol playing down a fishy vote, but it doesn't wash when you're the leader of the military and deploying troops. As one in a hundred in the Senate, John Kerry poses little threat to the union, but if this is the best he can do then he is plainly not up to making the decisions the solitary President of the United States, leader of the free world, is called upon to make.
In sum, John Kerry is not the wrong man to be president because his heart's in the wrong place, but because his head is.
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