Hat tip to Bearcatbob
Insulting A Friend
Politics: Sen. John Kerry and his crew have proved Sen. Zell Miller right. They really will say anything to get elected, even if that means undermining a courageous ally and greasing the skids to defeat in Iraq.
It was the renegade Democrat Miller who roused the 2004 Republican convention and raised the ire of the taste police with lines like these:
"Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief."
Strong stuff. At the time, even some on the GOP side suggested that Miller had gone too far. But after the events of the past week, we're wondering if he might not have gone far enough.
That "manic obsession" described by Miller has so consumed Kerry and his campaign aides that they don't seem to care how much harm they do to the national interest or to America's allies.
One of those allies, maybe the most important one at this point, is Iraq's interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Allawi is a true hero, a man who has stepped forward for the hazardous mission of forming an effective Iraqi government and shepherding the nation toward democracy. Terrorists have marked him for death. Even critics of President Bush's policies owe Allawi some respect.
They owe him support as well. If he fails, Iraq would slide closer to chaos, and the danger to U.S. troops and civilians would rise accordingly. Whether the goal is to win or just get out unscathed, it would be harder to achieve.
So how did the Democratic presidential nominee show his respect and support for Allawi? By snubbing his Thursday speech to Congress (along with a number of other Democrats) and, as soon as it ended, calling him little better than a liar and a lap dog.
It was an insult as ignoble as Kerry's description of the coalition allies as "the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted."
In his speech, Allawi said the situation in Iraq is less chaotic than news reports make it seem, and the country should be able to hold national elections as scheduled in January. Kerry, who has pegged his campaign on persuading the American people that the Iraq war is an unwinnable fiasco, couldn't let such optimism go unchallenged, even when it came from a man who actually lives in Iraq.
So he suggested, not so subtly, that Allawi was bending the truth just to give Bush a boost.
"The prime minister and the president are here obviously to put their best face on the (Iraq) policy," he said, "but the fact is that the CIA estimates, reporting, the ground operations and the troops all tell a different story."
That was "relatively restrained," as Los Angeles Times' Ron Brownstein noted, in comparison to what some Kerry aides were suggesting. Brownstein quoted one of them, senior adviser Joe Lockhart, as saying of the courageous Allawi: "The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips."
What might Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and our other enemies make of such comments? Kerry and Lockhart have played into their hands. To the extent that the Kerry campaign's view of Allawi gets around in Iraq, it will weaken the prime minister's government. It's never helpful to a leader to be seen as anyone's puppet, yet here's Kerry and his crew calling Allawi just that.
Are we saying that the Kerry campaign is deliberately seeking to undermine Allawi, destabilize Iraq, embolden terrorists and bring about a U.S. defeat?
No. But Kerry's insulting treatment of a key ally shows him to be irresponsible, graceless and obsessively bent on winning office at all costs. Three little words come to mind: unfit to serve.
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