The John Kerry Post of the Day

My latest discovery about my favorite cheese-eating surrendermonkey-looking Ketchup King cum Presidential candidate:
 
The Senator's on vacation (and as his Massachusetts constituents know, he's pretty much been on vacation all year, based on his Senate voting record).  But luckily, we have a couple Kerry surrogates providing plenty of fun news.
 
Let's start with raving lunatic Max Cleland, formerly a Senator from Georgia and a war hero.  Cleland's latest ramblings, as reported by Agencie France-Press:
 

Cleland, a national co-chairman of Kerry's campaign, described the Bush administration's arguments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda terrorists, as a "pack of lies."

The former lawmaker from the southern state of Georgia defended the vote that he, Kerry and others cast in the Senate to authorize military intervention in Iraq, saying the Congress was "flat-out lied to."

Asked whether they were lied to by the intelligence services or the White House, he said emphatically: "By the president, by the vice president and by the secretary of defense."

Cleland said that Bush went to war "because he concluded that his daddy was a failed president and one of the ways he failed was that he did not take out Saddam Hussein" in the 1991 Gulf war. "So he (Bush junior) is Mr. Macho Man."

He added that Kerry, from Massachusetts, agreed with the assessment of Bush's credibility. "About a year ago John Kerry said,'The president lied, he lied to me personally,'" said Cleland, a badly wounded Vietnam war veteran.

Cleland, who has led the cadre of Kerry's Vietnam comrades supporting the candidate, went further than the draft Democratic platform to be adopted next week by the party's convention for its drive to unseat Bush in November.

The draft says, "People of good will disagree about whether America should have gone to war in Iraq, but this much is clear: This Administration badly exaggerated its case."

But McAuliffe did not back away from Cleland's allegation of outright lying. He said only that the platform committee "did an excellent job of representing where this party stands as it relates to issues on national security."

"The platform does not get into specifics on all the different issues. ... It is a document that all Democrats can run on."

 
Oh, where do we start?  First of all, maybe all Democratic Senators from the South become insane when they lose elections; so far we have Gore and Cleland.  Maybe Chuck Robb was too far north or something.
 
Second, Cleland apparently forgot to list other folks who "lied."  Various Clinton administration folks made the case that Saddam was pursuing or already had WMD.  Here's Al Gore in December 1998 on Larry King Live: 

We need national resolve and unity, not weakness and division when we're involved engaged in an action against someone like Saddam Hussein, who is trying to get weapons of mass destruction and threaten his neighbors. ... [I]f you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons; he poison gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunctions about killing lots and lots of people. "

Gore wasn't the only one who believed this.  So did Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security Advisor, who is serving as an advisor to the Kerry camp, in an interview with Tony Snow on Fox News in February 1998:
 

FOX NEWS's TONY SNOW: "A lot of people say, well, why should we go to war unless there's an attack on us? Is Saddam going to attack us?"
 
BERGER: "Well, he's going... the danger here is that he is able to have sanctuaries, safe havens, to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction, which he can use to threaten or intimidate his neighbors in a region of the world. And that's something we simply cannot permit to happen. This is not in our own national interest. It's not so much a question of him in the short term delivering these weapons to the United States, but that region of the world - for security, strategic, economic and other reasons... is extraordinarily important to the United States."

 
Even many Democratic lawmakers said so; Cleland's own candidate, the vacationing Ketchup King, said the following before Congress in October 2002:

"It would be naive to the point of grave danger not to believe that, left to his own devices, Saddam Hussein will provoke, misjudge, or stumble into a future, more dangerous confrontation with the civilized world... He has supported and harbored terrorist groups, particularly radical Palestinian groups such as Abu Nidal, and he has given money to families of suicide murderers in Israel... We should not go to war because these things are in his past, but we should be prepared to go to war because of what they tell us about the future."

 
Third, Cleland can't attack the President's policy substantively -- so he gets into name-calling instead.  This is the same whiny tone he used when he got nailed for his votes on Homeland Security during his Senate campaign.  His statements have no substance and barely pass the level of what one would expect from a DNC staffer in a red shirt standing on Connecticut Avenue.  Actually, that's unfair; the DNC staffers aren't insane.
 
Finally, we have McAuliffe, the open symbol of what's wrong with the Democratic Party.  Terry's able to raise tons of money and lead blistering partisan attacks, even though most of them are about as articulate as Homer Simpson's love letters to Marge.  But when it comes to speaking about the goals of the party, as embodied by its draft platform, McAuliffe can't even take the time to articulate why those ideas are important.  Say what you will about my party of choice, but we're the ones bringing policy ideas to the table for discussion.  School choice.  Social security reform.  Tax cuts to spur the economy.  Tort reform.  And that's just in the domestic policy arena, where people believe the GOP is at a deficit to the other party.  They just never mention what ideas the Democrats actually have.  Seriously, other than maintaining the status quo for the National Education Association, NARAL and trial lawyers, does the Democratic Party stand for anything other than demoguagary?  I'd wait for a response from Terry, but I'm sure he's got his hand out to a trial lawyer and is on the phone with People for the American Way.
 
Stay tuned for tomorrow, when we enjoy time with one JFK II's national security consultants, the aforementioned Sandy Berger, who apparently likes shoving classified documents down his pants...