The John Kerry Post of the Day

My latest discovery about my favorite cheese-eating surrendermonkey-looking Ketchup King cum Presidential candidate:

I'd spend more time addressing the Swift Boat Saga, but that may take more time than I have. Instead, let's analyze the Kerry Cold War record, courtesy of Joshua Muravchik at the LA Times, with a tip o' the hat to the Key Monk:

The Cold War also provides our best measuring stick for estimating how Kerry might perform as commander in chief, and in that conflict Kerry's instincts were always awry. Had the country heeded his counsel, we might not yet have won it.

Many leaders had a hand in Washington's Cold War triumph, but Ronald Reagan's contributions were pivotal, and Kerry opposed every one of them. Reagan's defense buildup disabused Soviet leaders of any hope that they could ultimately come out ahead of the United States. Kerry derided these military expenditures as "bloated" and "without any relevancy to the threat." In particular, Reagan's plan to seek a missile defense system against Soviet ICBMs and NATO's decision to station new missiles in Europe to counteract the new Soviet deployment there rendered futile the Kremlin's vast investment in nuclear supremacy. Instead of these measures, Kerry advocated that we adopt a one-sided "nuclear freeze."

Reagan also showed the Soviets that history was not necessarily on their side by ousting the erratic communist regime in Grenada and arming anti-communist guerrillas to challenge the leftist oligarchs of Nicaragua. Kerry condemned the U.S. action in Grenada as "a bully's show of force," and he opposed our support for guerrillas in Nicaragua as vociferously as anyone in the Senate, even traveling to Managua to try to cut a deal with Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega to thwart Reagan's policy.

Reagan also put the U.S. on the ideological offensive when he branded the Soviet Union an "evil empire." But Kerry's harshest words were reserved for our own country, which he accused — during his years as an antiwar leader — of "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

Not only in the Cold War but also in other events that foreshadowed today's challenges, Kerry consistently got it wrong. In 1986, Reagan bombed Moammar Kadafi's residence when intelligence intercepts showed that the Libyan dictator was behind the terrorist bombing of a nightclub full of American soldiers in Germany. Kerry denounced the U.S. retaliatory strike as "not proportional." And when Saddam Hussein swallowed Kuwait in 1990, Kerry opposed using force to drive him out, calling instead for reliance on economic sanctions.

All in all, in his 20 years in the Senate, Kerry ranks as one of the five most dovish or liberal members on foreign policy if you tally up the key votes selected by the liberal advocacy group, Americans for Democratic Action. Is it any wonder that Kerry is seeking to focus voters' attention on his courage as a Navy officer rather than his judgment as a political leader?

I guess now we have a better understanding of why Kerry's many years in the Senate went virtually unmentioned during his acceptance speech at the Boston Botox Party. In all seriousness, this record shows an astonishingly liberal viewpoint during the Cold War. The freeze movement might have been considered respectable at the time, but history has demonstrated that the advocates of the "Nuclear Freeze" were dead wrong. The opposition to the first Gulf War also demonstrates a man who's unable to take decisive action, even after an ally has been attacked. Rest assured that in John Kerry's America, Saddam would not only have been building WMD, he would have had extra oil from Kuwait as his financing.

Maybe we shouldn't pick on John too much. After all, he does have to deal with Teresa on the campaign trail, as CNN noted...

Think it's been a long trip for Teresa? On a slow pass through Arizona last
night, Teresa took the microphone and said, "Hello, Nevada!" Kerry leaned into
his fatigued wife quickly and said, "Arizona." "Oh, Arizona!" she replied.
"We're in Arizona. We're still in Arizona. and we are going to Nevada. If you've
been in as many places as we've been in in the past 12, 13 days, even if you
have a map, the hours make you mix them all up."

I'd be sympathetic to a woman who's clearly out of her element... except that this lady's spent her adult life married to politicans. She should be used to it by now. But hey, at least she can duck out of the pressure-cooker if Kerry somehow wins. It's not like the First lady has a high profile or anything.