According to Dan Drezner (according to Tigerhawk), this is the line that will be hardest for President Bush to rebut:
“As President, I will ask hard questions and demand hard evidence. I will immediately reform the intelligence system - so policy is guided by facts, and facts are never distorted by politics. And as President, I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to; we only go to war because we have to.”Let’s just say you’re the President of the United States, and you face a grave and growing threat. (You’re not sure if it’s imminent or not; that’s the point. Get it?) For the sake of discussion, let’s say we’re talking about Iran. It’s 2006 and the mullahs have just ripped the seals off the IAEA-inspected centrifuges (Oops! That happened just last week. Well, relax, it’s only a hypothetical.) We are afraid Iran is within a few months +/- of developing several atomic warheads. You turn to your 17 heads of federal intelligence agencies and say,
“I’m John Kerry and I demand hard evidence!”
And they talk of communications intercepts and show you some suggestive satellite photos (not that kind of suggestive, Rooney!) and you say,
“I’m John Kerry and I demand hard evidence!”
And they say, “Sorry boss. We don’t have any. We haven’t had any genuine US American citizen spies in Iran for more than twenty yeaars. We have a lot of stuff from various Iranian expatriates, but we don’t know for sure if they’re feeding us crap in hopes of reward or of seizing power for themselves in Iran after we’ve cleaned out the mullahs for them. The satellites can’t see inside buildings, much less hearts and minds. We have loads and loads of evidence, most of it corroborated by French, British, Russian, and Israeli intelligence agencies. Also, all the new stuff we're getting agrees with all the previous administration's stuff. But if you want “hard evidence”, then, sorry, we got nothing.”
Then, if you’re George Bush, you say, “I see a threat. Let’s roll.”
If you’re John Kerry, you say, “America will never go to war because it wants to.”
And that should just about do it for this election.
[Wretchard has more to say on point. Go to the continuation to check it out.]
Want more? Well what about this? Democrat nominee John Kerry also said in his acceptance speech:
“And proclaiming mission accomplished certainly doesn't make it so.”For the last time, the ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign was on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, which had spent a record (or near record, I forget) time at sea. The ship and her crew had damn well accomplished their mission. It was not the White House’s sign; it was the Lincoln’s. Only the Moore-ass-kissing people have blanked this out of their minds; the rest of us are sick of hearing it.
Then there’s this line from the acceptance speech:
“Saying we can fight a war on the cheap doesn't make it so.”No, but conquering a despot and his army in a few weeks and then turning the country back over to its rightful owners, the people of Iraq, in less than two years damn well does make it so.
It worked, therefore Rumsfeld was right and his critics are wrong. At least, they were wrong to the extent they said Rummy’s way was impossible and wouldn’t work. Would flooding the nation of Iraq with a couple of hundred thousand (imaginary) extra troops have worked better? We’ll never know, but compared to all other wars in the history of the US, if not the world, this one was a miracle of speed and mercy. If John Kerry wants to say he could have done better than the all-time greatest hit, then the burden of proof is on him.
Incredulous voters will, at the very least, demand a detail or two.
So with all due respect, M. Drezner, if that’s the best the Democrat nominee has got, then he ain’t got much.
Over at The Belmont Club, Wretchard has this to say:
Voters need more than an index of a Kerry administration retaliatory threshold to judge him as a potential Commander in Chief. Kerry should clarify how he plans to win, if not the present war, then at least a future one, if it comes according to his standard. The cast of characters, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are unlikely to change. The electorate should be granted a glimpse into his roadmap to victory and whether he believes in the concept itself as distinct from mere retaliation. Any brawler with fists can retaliate but it requires a Commanders in Chief with a strategy to lead nations to victory. Even Bill Clinton was prepared to retaliate against Osama Bin Laden for the USS Cole attack by firing hundreds of cruise missiles at his training camps. But George Bush tried to defeat him and for this stood condemned. It is this precise striving for victory, not any single act of retaliation that has made George Bush so illegitimate in the liberal mind. For liberals retaliation is soley used to "send a message"; it always an invitation to negotiation, like the ones Johnson sent Ho Chi Minh without reply; it is never part of the solution itself. In this curious mental universe, force is immoral unless it is also pointless. John Kerry's self-chosen identification with the Vietnam War is a strangely ambiguous image, which escapes being tragic only for so long as you allow only questions for which there can be no answers.
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Emphasis added. And as usual, Wretchard is worth reading the whole thing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse.
William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech
Stockholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950
Read 'em and weep - ye democratic party cowards...
Posted by: Mikey | July 30, 2004 at 09:14 PM
And the irony is, the Lefties consider Faulkner to be one of their guys. They've grown so used to lying that they don't even recognize it in themselves anymore.
Posted by: pedro | July 31, 2004 at 02:32 PM