The John Kerry Post of the Day

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

Sorry, I skipped Friday's post for a simple reason: I was suffering from a cold. No Purple Heart jokes -- Senator McCain's sick of Vietnam, remember.

Jokes aside, our favorite Condiment King has issues with more than just his Vietnam service. This episode seems reminiscent of his vote on funding the troops in Iraq...

John Kerry had just pumped up a huge crowd in downtown West Palm Beach, promising to make the state a battleground for his quest to oust President Bush, when a local television journalist posed the question that any candidate with Florida ambitions should expect: What will you do about Cuba?

As the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kerry was ready with the bravado appropriate for a challenger who knows that every answer carries magnified importance in the state that put President Bush into office by just 537 votes.

''I'm pretty tough on Castro, because I think he's running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist secret police government in the world,'' Kerry told WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Michael Putney in an interview to be aired at 11:30 this morning.

Then, reaching back eight years to one of the more significant efforts to toughen sanctions on the communist island, Kerry volunteered: ``And I voted for the Helms-Burton legislation to be tough on companies that deal with him.''

It seemed the correct answer in a year in which Democratic strategists think they can make a play for at least a portion of the important Cuban-American vote -- as they did in 1996 when more than three in 10 backed President Clinton's reelection after he signed the sanctions measure written by Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Dan Burton.

There is only one problem: Kerry voted against it.

Asked Friday to explain the discrepancy, Kerry aides said the senator cast one of the 22 nays that day in 1996 because he disagreed with some of the final technical aspects. But, said spokesman David Wade, Kerry supported the legislation in its purer form -- and voted for it months earlier.

Years ago, back in my fraternity days, my brothers and I used to debate extending bids to prospective brothers following the rush period. These votes sometime took hours, as people (including me, to be fair) often took the time to deliver long, useless speeches about each and every candidate, even the ones who were clearly going to be admitted or rejected. I guess this is close to the atmosphere of the U.S. Senate.

In any case, one of my brothers had the habit of speaking up against a candidate during the debate, then voting for him. Or vice versa. I always figured he was drunk. I'm not sure what excuse Kerry has.

Well, at least he's consistent in his behavior. Apparently, if he votes for a bill one time, he'll vote against it the next time.