I have to agree with John Kerry when he said this:
…those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don’t have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president.
Sadly, the John Kerry that said that no longer seems to be the John Kerry running for President. As Bill Kristol notes:
JOHN KERRY said yesterday that Iraq was “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Translation: We would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power.
Not an unheard of point of view. Indeed, as President Bush pointed out today, it was Howard Dean’s position during the primary season. On December 15, 2003, in a speech at the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles, Dean said that “the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer.” Dean also said, “The difficulties and tragedies we have faced in Iraq show the administration launched the war in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with inadequate planning, insufficient help, and at the extraordinary cost, so far, of $166 billion.”
But who challenged Dean immediately? John Kerry. On December 16, at Drake University in Iowa, Kerry asserted that “those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don’t have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president.”
Kerry was right then.
Unfortunately, were Kerry’s earlier position on Iraq his actual conviction, he appears to have abandoned it today.
Would you care to mention this?
Bill O’ Reilly, leading news commentator on Fox TV Said:
“I don’t have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all. I have no respect for them. I think that they’re a prehistoric group that is – yeah, there’s excuses. Sure, they’re terrorized, they’ve never known freedom, all of that. There’s excuses. I understand.But I don’t have to respect them because you know when you have Americans dying trying to, you know institute some kind of democracy there, and two percent of the people appreciate it, you know, it’s time to – time to wise up. The big lesson is that we cannot intervene using ground troops in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do, is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans. Bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds; ain’t going to work They’re just people who are primitive.”
If O’Reilly said that, he is completely and utterly wrong and should apologize to the millions of Iraqis who are being targeted by the terrorists that seek to prevent them from obtaining peace and democracy.
Vincent: Why don’t you stay on topic in this thread? We are not discussing Bill O’Reilly, but Pres Bush and John Kerry. When O’Reilly runs for president we can add his thoughts to this discussion. Quite frankly, I sometimes enjoy O’Reilly but don’t always agree with him, nor hold him up as some oracle.
Back to the original post, it appears we have yet another flip flop of Sen Kerry. It is interesting that as the campaign progresses he is forced to sound more and more like Dean as he retreats to the Dean base of the loony left. Not exactly the move of a campaign expanding to claim the political center.
So now he is staking out the Dean position on the war…which, of course, worked so well for Dean…that largely because of that he was deemed “unelectable”…it’s ironic how it’s all come around again…
The good thing about running against Kerry is that by now, no matter what he says, he will have said something totally contradictory before.
Speaking of Dean, it is so funny that the media made such a big deal of a supposed Dean flip flop, regarding his 5 year old interview with some obscure Canadian TV show criticizing the caucus system he then, at the time of the primaries, embraced, and cited that as some huge contradiction. Now the media is faced with a much larger Kerry flip flop on a much more crucial issue, and doesn’t focus on it nearly as much.
Honey,
Two things:
1)Most experts have confirmed the authenticity of the Bush memos. Only a few are still discombobulated by the type face.
2) In your entry on Sept. 8th why didn’t you say that it was your Aunt Kate’s birthday?
Love, Your Democratiic Aunt Kate from New York