Sullivan - QUOTE OF THE DAY: "You know when they give you the menu, I'm always struggling, what do you want?" - John Kerry. Does Karl Rove give him his ad-libs?
KERRY'S DEADLY DEADLINE: In his latest adjustment, John Kerry is now becoming a more straight-forward opponent of the Iraq war; and his statement Monday that he wants to bring all the troops home in four years is as close to Howard Dean as he's been since, well, December. The president's tilting at Kerry for his Dean-like rhetoric is not as effective, it seems to me, as criticizing Kerry's declaration of advance withdrawal to terrorists. Look, Kerry deserves some benefit of the doubt with respect to his general support of the War on Terror, and decision not to cut and run immediately in Iraq. But there's no chance that other countries can or will make up the gap in armed forces in Iraq, and the signal of weakness Kerry's deadline sends to the Islamists, Baathists and Shiite separatists could make our possible failure in Iraq a self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess the sane criticism of the Iraq war - undermined by bad intelligence, crippled by incompetence, but still worth winning - is too nuanced a position for a challenger to make. But the alternative only adds to a sense that Kerry cannot be trusted to keep our nerve in Iraq. Or anywhere else for that matter. (And please stop the emails assuming I'll endorse Kerry. The Senator's recent dreadful performance and pathetic equivocations on the war only further convince me that Bush truly is the luckiest man alive.) |
