The John Kerry Post of the Day

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

This one's a day old, but too good to pass up. From yesterday's Best of the Web column by James Taranto at OpinionJournal.com, here's an AP report regarding the exchange of rhetoric by the campaigns earlier this week:

Bush also took issue with Kerry's pronouncement this week that he and running mate John Edwards were proud of the fact that they opposed in the Senate the $87 billion aid package for Afghanistan and Iraq. Kerry said they had done so because "we knew the policy had to be changed."

"He's entitled to his view," Bush said. "But members of Congress should not vote to send troops into battle and then vote against funding them, and then brag about it."

Kerry's campaign responded that Kerry had served in the Vietnam War and questions linger about Bush's wartime service in the Texas Air National Guard.

"Considering that George Bush actively avoided combat duty and has pursued policies that have made the nation less secure, he is on very shaky ground when it comes to questioning the commitment that Vietnam vet John Kerry has to our national security," said former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., a Vietnam War veteran and frequent Kerry surrogate. "This is just more attack-dog politicking by an increasingly desperate, partisan White House."

Okay, I'm officially calling Max Cleland an idiot. No, I'm not questioning his patriotism -- just his sanity and intelligence. This is the entire election campaign boiled down to the basics.

Bush challenged Kerry (and his cocker spaniel/running mate) on a policy choice. The choice was to vote for or against funding for the troops who were in Iraq, after they had voted to authorize the use of force (granted, Kerry isn't sure what he voted for, but anyone with two functioning brain cells knows he voted to allow the use of force) in Iraq. To not provide funding to the troops because the "policy had to be changed" is meaningless crap, and they know it. If the authorization had not passed, how would the policy have changed, exactly? Bush is challenging Kerry to explain his vote.

This isn't dirty politicking. This is a question for an opponent on his voting record in office, on a vote that took place last year, on a vote that concerns one of the most important issues in this election.

The Democratic response says a lot about Kerry's campaign. Max Cleland's response is to whine about attack-dog politics, all the while engaging in it. They rip Bush for his National Guard service, rather than addressing the issue of the vote on funding. They won't deal with the issue itself. That's part one of the response.

Part two of the response is pretty simple as well -- point out that John Kerry served in Vietnam, and Bush did not. What's not funny is that this is the entire reason they have for voting for Kerry -- nothing more, nothing less. This is his reason for everything. It's to the point that I wonder if he popped the question to each of his wives this way:

"Honey, will you marry me? Hold on... okay, I'm sure. Maybe not... nah. I am sure. No, really I am. Hold on, let's try that from the top. Please, will you marry me? Before you answer, I think you should consider an important fact -- I served in Vietnam."

The Wedding Update

by the world's least dangerous man

This wedding update is brought to you by Best Buy... apparently the only store where I won't be allowed to register.

380 days to go.

We're still trying to figure out a way to integrate the two cultures as part of the ceremony. The other night, Alli mentions she watched one of those reality shows featuring weddings (yet another reason for me to despise reality shows). This show included the wedding of a Indian girl to an American guy, where the guy rode in on an elephant. And while this would be perfect for the hardcore Republican that I am, I just can't get into the idea, mostly out of a fear that the elephant would go wild and step on the cake, and maybe pee on the guests.

There's no real point to this post, except that I find the idea of an elephant peeing on people in formal wear to be funny. Yeah, I'm not sure why she's marrying me either.

The Latest Political Rant

by the world's least dangerous man

Okay, so I'm leaving the building for lunch yesterday (ummm... steak) and they're out there, this time with red shirts.

"Want to help us kick Bush out of the White House?"

On the way back into the office, two new ones, same red shirts...

"Do you guys want to kick Bush out of office?"

I decided to ignore the red shirts, since I've also seen them wearing shirts and ties, carrying clipboards and looking very earnest. I also successfully fought the urge to ask them how the three of us and their clipboard would succeed in their quest to remove Bush from the Oval Office (especially without Frodo and Sam). I did notice that one of the girls was really attractive (and that the guy with her spent more time leering at her than trying to make eye contact with passerby)

But I'm perplexed. I know what they're against -- George W. Bush, whom they believe to be the mentally-handicapped un-elected Texas cowboy-imperialist warmonger. They're against the Iraq war. They're against Bush's foreign policy. They're against tax cuts for the wealthy. They're against Bush's education policy. They may even be against campaigns against teenage alcoholism, if Bush supported such a campaign.

But what are they for?

Oh, I know that these Bush-haters can't actively campaign for Kerry without violating some arcane corner of McCain-Feingold, lest George Soros' money machine be implicated in something terrible, like engaging in First Amendment activity that doesn't involve Janet Jackson's nippleshield or Howard Stern swearing. And DNC staffers can't openly advocate anything in favor Kerry until he's officially the nominee, probably because it might offend the three people who like Dennis Kucinich. But what do they stand for? Do they even know?

You know, I try to understand. I remember how much I disliked Bill Clinton in 1996. I'm assuming that if I had been older than six, I might have developed a similar distaste for the Master of Malaise in 1980. Instead, I simply thought Carter was the goofy guy who liked peanuts, while Reagan looked nice and liked jellybeans, and I liked jellybeans better. I know that's a pretty dumb reason to choose one political party over another -- but it's still smarter than the idiot chant, "Bush Lied! People Died!"

Back to Clinton, circa 1996. I spent most of that year wondering how anyone with a functioning brain who wasn't ignorant or a left-wing zealot (note: yes, I know) could choose Clinton over Dole. Clinton was slime, and deserved to be in office about as much as Yasser Arafat deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.

But hating someone is never something the electorate will buy in spades, unless it's O.J. Simpson or Charles Manson. And chances are, if the person got elected President, people found plenty to like about the guy, so it's hard to convince them he's a bad guy. Put it this way -- people who voted for Clinton the first time around weren't going to be convinced that he was an evil person, just misguided. And most of the rest of the country, after four years of exposure to Clinton, thought of him as the ultra-smart frat guy frustrating the tight-assed dean.

It's different in 2004, I understand that. We're at war, and it's an issue that stirs passions. It may even stir enough passions to fatally damage Bush's re-election.

Except for this one thing -- most of the country doesn't hate George W. Bush. By that, I don't just mean everyone west of Cambridge and east of Berkley -- I mean the vast majority of the people in this country think Bush is a decent guy. They may have doubts about Iraq, may think he's misguided, may think he's not that smart, may wonder if we're doing the right thing at times, may even decide to vote for Kerry -- but they don't really believe in their hearts that Bush is a puppet of evil right-wing neocons, bent on war for oil and ready to send Ashcroft in to kill you if you speak up. Hell, most of them don't even believe that evil right-wing neocons exist, since we've done such a good job hypnotizing all of you.

What this says to me is that Kerry is doing the same thing Bush is -- appealing to his base, all the horsebleep rhetoric about unity aside. That's well and good, but Bush has a record to run on, and a clear set of principles he's advocating. If Bush is vulnerable on policy, it's on the right, where conservatives like me wish we'd cut spending and focus on real Social Security reform and tort reform. But Kerry won't run there -- he can't.

In the end, Kerry's not running for anything. He's not working at selling any specific policy changes or ideas, and he's definitely unable to articulate what Bush I called the "vision thing." All he's really doing is telling us that he's a war hero, and he's not George W. Bush.

The latter point will be enough to convince the folks in red shirts. But the danger in not articulating any particular ideas -- when all you're selling is yourself -- is that the voters in the middle might just prefer the guy who's telling them exactly who he is today (as opposed to who he was thirty years ago) and what he'll do. Reagan and Clinton are both derided by the opposition as nothing more than showmen, but both actually offered the voters ideas (the difference being, Reagan actually believed them, while Clinton believed more in himself), and the swing voters listened... mostly because the guy on the other side didn't offer a damn thing other than criticism and fear.

That's Kerry's real problem. He can make this election a referendum on the incumbent, but he can't make uncommitted voters choose nothing over something. And he's offering nothing to this point. He's offering his life story and his own personality -- the former is pretty irrelevant to the American public, while the latter is, to be charitable, not as nice as his hair. And that won't get the job done. It's one reason why I think Bush could win in a blowout.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong. But who are you going to believe, me or the attractive girl wearing the red shirt?

Okay, don't answer that.

The John Kerry Post of the Day

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

JFK 2.0 spoke at the NAACP Convention today, in my former hometown of Philadelphia. There's no word on whether he stopped for a cheesesteak at Pat's again, although I'm guessing he won't make the mistake of ordering a steak with Swiss this time around (maybe brie, though).

But here's an excerpt from his speech, courtesy of NRO Online's Kerry Spot, as reported by Jim Geraghty:

"I will be a President who talks with everyone — those who agree with me and those who don't. I will be a President who truly is a uniter, not one who seeks to divide our nation by race, riches or any other label. I will be a President who shares the values of people of all colors who get up and go to work every day, try to raise their families in dignity and want to leave this world a better place for their children. I will be a President who when he is invited into your home, will always say yes."

And people say Bush lies. If I invite John Kerry into my house, I'm guessing I'll need to have at least 100 people paying $1,000 a piece for the privilege of five minutes of the Senator's time. But on this basis alone, I'm inviting Kerry to the wedding -- at the very least, Teresa Heinz-Kerry can afford a helluva nice gift.

The John Kerry Post of the Day

New feature, folks (who am I kidding? These are all new features. Oh, wait -- no one's reading this yet anyway). I plan to try and post my latest discovery about my favorite cheese-eating surrendermonkey-looking Ketchup King cum Presidential candidate each day. That may be tough (Kerry's not that exciting a guy, Botox injections notwithstanding), but I have faith that JFK II (more on that some other day) will give me plenty of working material. And in a pinch, I can pull a Michael Moore and just make stuff up.

This is from Peter Gammons at ESPN, circa 2000, via Jonah Goldberg at NRO Online:

We have been led to cynically believe that many politicians are disingenuous and generally phony, but few will ever beat Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. This man, who changed his middle initial to be JFK and at an anti-Vietnam rally threw someone else's medals into the water, made a self-promotion appearance with Boston talk-show maven Eddie Andelman and claimed he was a big Red Sox fan from his days growing up in Groton, Mass. And at the promotion he said Eddie Yost was his favorite player.

The problem with that is just the simple fact that Eddie Yost never played for the Red Sox.

I'm Back... to Celebrate Bastille Day

by the world's least dangerous man

Okay, not exactly news. But it's time to starting penning this thread for real.

As for today, let's start simple, with a few gems to celebrate Bastille Day properly...

"The French are sawed-off sissies who eat snails and slugs and cheese that smells like people's feet. Utter cowards who force their own children to drink wine, they gibber like baboons even when you try to speak to them in their own wimpy language."

-- P.J. O'Rourke
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion."

— Norman Schwartzkopf

"It took no more effort than casting a Frenchman into hell."

-- Dutch saying

"I don't know why people are surprised that France won't help us get Saddam out of Iraq. After all, France wouldn't help us get the Germans out of France."

—Jay Leno

"You know, the French remind me a little bit of an aging actress of the 1940s who was still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn't have the face for it."

— John McCain

"France is the only country where the money falls apart and you can't tear the toilet paper."

-- Billy Wilder
"France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams."

-- Thomas Carlyle

"I just love the French. They taste like chicken."

-- Hannibal Lector

"Broadway producers are saying that because of the war, musicals are suffering from weak ticket sales. Not only that, over at 'Les Miserables,' the French are refusing to take part in the revolution."

—Conan O'Brien

"The only time France wants us to go to war is when the German Army is sitting in Paris sipping coffee."

— Regis Philbin

"A fighting Frenchman runs away from even a she-goat."

-- Russian saying

"The French, you might as well gas up the dinghy and go fishing with Fredo because you are dead to me, okay. You know something? These pricks are now putting — they're putting swastikas on our flag in France. You've got all those boys buried in Normandy. And after we had the good taste to chisel the armpit hair off the Statue of Liberty you gave us, you know something, I — always thought that tint was oxdized copper. Little did I know it was green with envy... Listen, I would call the French scum bags, but that, of course, would be a disservice to bags filled with scum."

-- Dennis Miller

"I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me."

—General George S. Patton

"France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France... Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country. France has usually been governed by prostitutes. "

-- Mark Twain

"The French complain about everything and always."

-- Napolean

"Army personnel in Kuwait unloaded a dozen faulty tanks that only go in reverse. Tanks that only go in reverse — they've been repackaged and sold to France."

-- Craig Kilborn

"Now, as we all know, there are many good reasons to hate the cheese-eating surrender monkeys... Survey after survey reveals that raccoons bathe more than the average Frenchman. They stuck us with Vietnam and took credit for liberating Paris after they spent most of World War Two chastising the chef for not serving Herr General a Fresh brioche."

-- Jonah Goldberg

"We can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it."

— Marge Simpson
"It is good to hate the French."

-- Al Bundy