The John Kerry Post of the Day

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

Oh, great. Now we have his latest Iraq policy...

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry today delivered a scathing critique of President Bush's war leadership, charging that Bush's "colossal failures of judgment" and "reckless mistakes" have weakened U.S. national security, diverted resources from the war on terrorism and mired the country in a costly conflict in Iraq with no end in sight.

In a speech at New York University that Kerry's campaign billed as a major address on his plans for Iraq, the senator from Massachusetts said the Bush administration's "stubborn incompetence" has created a mess in the country and that "a fresh start" is needed under new leadership.

He outlined four imperatives in Iraq, saying the president must obtain promised international support, "get serious about training Iraqi security forces," carry out an effective reconstruction plan and take urgent steps to guarantee the holding of elections scheduled for next year. "If the president would move in this direction . . . we could begin to withdraw U.S. forces starting next summer and realistically aim to bring all our troops home within the next four years," Kerry said.

...Kerry implicitly defended his 2002 vote to give Bush authority to use force to oust Hussein, saying any president would need that threat to act effectively. However, Kerry added, "This president misused that authority" and rushed to war based on faulty rationales without sufficient international support and without a long-term plan.

"Yet today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way," Kerry said. "How can he possibly be serious? Is he really saying to America that if we knew there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to al Qaeda, the United States should have invaded Iraq? My answer, resoundingly: no -- because a commander-in-chief's first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep America safe."

Let me start with the so-called four-point plan. This isn't FDR's Four Freedoms. In a nutshell, here's what Kerry's ideas boil down to:

1. Get more foreign troops into Iraq.
2. Train more of the Iraqi police and train them more effectively.
3. Carry out more effective reconstruction.
4. Make sure the elections take place on time next year.

Hmmmm.... let's see the specifics here. Are there any?

Let's start with #1. Do we know what phantom ghost countries are suddenly going to send more troops to Iraq? Perhaps the lost city of Atlantis has been holding back for just this very moment -- maybe Kerry is close friends with Aquaman or something. Personally, I'm wondering how a guy whom so many people find personally abhorrent after they get to know him well (see: the Swift Boat Vets) will be able to convince anyone to help us, but that's neither here nor there. The fact of the matter is, none of the purported great allies are sending troops, whether Bush or Kerry is elected. We're not even sure if they're capable of sending troops, since they've drawn down their military capabilities so far.

As for #2... Kerry spends time disputing the Adminstration claim of how many new Iraqi police have been trained. Forget about the numbers dispute for a second -- how exactly does Kerry propose to speed-train troops after he's elected, such that our troops go home faster? If he has a specific idea, doesn't it behoove him (and our troops, and the nation) to offer it now? What's he going to offer, a Kaplan course?

#3 and #4 represent a whole new level of guile from Ketchup Boy. What the hell does they mean? Nothing, much like his campaign. Kerry, who's supposedly nuanced enough to get into the details of everything else on the planet, doesn't offer any specifics. Apparently, I'm not the only one who notices, as the AP noted...

Kerry called on Bush to do a much better job rallying allies, training Iraqi security forces, hastening reconstruction plans and ensuring that elections are conducted on time. But his speech was thin on details, with Kerry saying Bush's miscalculations had made solutions harder to come by.

Bush cited Kerry's four-point plan and dismissed it as proposing "exactly what we're currently doing."

Seriously, there's effectively no difference in what Kerry is proposing to do from what Bush is doing in Steps 2, 3 and 4. As for Step 1, he can't even name where these new troops are coming from at this point. He won't offer details. We can only speculate why, but I can see four reasons:

1. He doesn't have any.
2. He can't make up his mind on what he would really do.
3. He doesn't have the guts to take a stand on the most important issue of the campaign, other than to say his opponent is wrong.
4. All of the above.

This guy wants to be President of the United States, yet he can't articulate a clear policy on what he would do if elected? I've been one of the people who's been criticizing Kerry for doing nothing more than criticizing Bush on Iraq, saying he needed to offer specifics on what he would do. Perhaps he needs a definition on what the word "specific" means.

Lastly, let me re-live the idiotic... no, wait, MORONIC rationale the Senator offers for voting to authorize the war, yet trying to campaign as if he opposed it. He voted to authorize the President to go to war, but he didn't mean it. If this rationale is true, he should have resigned from the Senate that day. He basically abdicated his duty to his constituents. Kerry needs to realize that a vote to authorize war is his decision on the matter of going to war. Noting changed in the run-up between Kerry's vote and the invasion -- last I checked, Saddam didn't offer to resign and become a panelist on Hollywood Squares, and he didn't comply with the U.N. resolutions in place. If Kerry wants to argue that Bush invaded Iraq in a terrible mistake, then he needs to admit that he made the same mistake in voting yes.

The fact that he can't do this underscores why he's such a terrible candidate. Right now, Joe Liberman is probably banging his head against a wall. Wesley Clark is smacking himself. Howard Dean is... well, screaming, but we all knew that. And Dick Gephardt is probably walking around Iowa asking, "What were you dumb Democrats thinking? Have you seen this idiot?"

Only one thing could be worse than Kerry the Candidate. That would be Kerry the President. I would laugh, but I'll wait until November to make sure this all really was a joke.