The John Kerry Post of the Day

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

Each day, I think he's getting dumber.

I'm serious. In the past 24 hours, I've heard or read about Kerry saying multiple things that might qualify as the most asinine comment made by a politician in 2004 -- and we're counting Howard Dean's screams, Alan Keyes' idiocy and every word that came out Dennis Kucinich's mouth. We'll deal with the line about the draft later, after I've had time to run to Canada (jokes aside, we'll deal with it later, after I stop shaking my head at this crap).

Let's start with yesterday's press conference, where Kerry finally "met" with the press for the first time since the first week of August, when he sat down with Russert. Keep in mind, this was fifteen minutes of pontificating from behind a podium; with the exception of visiting with Letterman, Jon Stewart and Regis, Kerry hasn't seen a reporter one-on-one in 50-plus days (and I'm being unfair to Stewart and Letterman; why lump them in with dishonorable reporters like Dan Rather?). But the Democratic windbag received no tough questions, and gave us a whopper of a line...

In the 15-minute press conference, Mr. Kerry was not questioned about contacts between his spokesman, Joe Lockhart, and retired Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, a virulent Bush critic who provided documents to CBS News that were said to have shown that Mr. Bush shirked his duties with the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

The documents have been identified as fraudulent by scores of media organizations, and CBS has apologized for airing the report.

On the Iraq war, Mr. Kerry accused the president of having "misled" the American people about its costs — both in casualties and money — and "each time has chosen to move in a unilateral way without the help" of the international community, which has "made this a riskier, tougher and more expensive operation." Mr. Kerry insisted that he has "a plan to make America safer" and persuade reluctant allies, such as France, Germany and Russia, to help support Iraq's fledgling democracy.

"You have to engage, I said, in a summit; that you ought to pull those people to the table and come out with a unified agreement as to what you're going to do to send a message to those wavering Iraqis who are sitting on the fence, unsure of which way this may go," Mr. Kerry said. "And they need to see the world at our side. I believe the president has not engaged in that kind of diplomacy and summitry."

The president has charged that if Mr. Kerry had his way in the run-up to the war — waiting long enough to allow inspectors to reveal that Saddam Hussein had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons — the Iraqi dictator would still be in power.

Mr. Kerry disputed that argument, saying the lack of such weapons would have eroded Saddam's ability to retain control of the country.

"If you don't have weapons of mass destruction, believe me, Saddam Hussein is a very different person," Mr. Kerry said. "That's what kept him power. And I believe Saddam Hussein would not be in power."

I'm going to ignore the fact that the word "summitry" cracks me up. It sounds like the sort of word George Will would use in a column. I'm also going to pass on the fact that the press decided not to ask Kerry about the connection between his campaign and the guy who provided forged memos to CBS. We all know the media's incapable of asking Kerry a seriously critical question. (to be fair, while it's a legitimate point to make, the Washington Times does seem to take some glee in pointing this out, in a manner that I would likely criticize if the Post opted to lead a Bush story on Iraq by noting that no reporter asked him about Abu Ghraib... of course, the press may never stop obsessing over Abu Ghraib).

But look at Kerry's last statement, and the logic train he employs to get there. Kerry apparently believes that if inspectors strolled around Iraq long enough, we'd all be satisfied that Saddam didn't have WMD -- a claim I find pretty hard to believe. After all, Saddam had played cat-and-mouse with access to places with the inspectors for years, until the U.N. focused on something else long enough for Saddam to boot the inspectors. Yet apparently, this time the inspections would have been allowed to continue and would have been allowed to be extensive enough that everyone would have been satisfied. And Kerry says Bush lives in a fantasy land?

Second, apparently it was the mere threat of WMD that kept the Iraqi people enslaved to a dictator all these years. According to Kerry, they would have mounted a successful insurrection as soon as Saddam was revealed to have no WMD, because that was all they feared. It wasn't the murders, the disfigurements, the rapes, the tortures... nah, none of that stuff would have stopped the insurrection. The Iraqi Army couldn't have stopped the enraged citizens of Iraq... well, yes, they did in 1990, but this time would have been different! Perhaps John Edwards would have led the way (we haven't seen him lately, after all... maybe he's in training).

It's stupidity like this that proves that maybe Kerry should avoid speaking to the press. Wait... maybe his campaign wasn't so dumb for the last 50 days.