Hewitt - I thought John Edwards was on the brink of tears last night when he rushed out to respond to Dick Cheney's matter-of-fact assessment that a Kerry presidency would increase the likelihood of a terrorist attack on the United States:
"What he said to the American people,'' Mr. Edwards said, "was that if you go to the polls in November and elect anyone other than us, then another terrorist attack occurs, it's your fault. This is un-American.''
That's not what Cheney said, of course, but how, exactly, is it un-American to state a sincerely held belief in your opponent's incompetence? Last week Senator Lightweight was out on the hustings proposing the sale of nuclear fuel to Iran in exchange for paper guarantees. Does appeasement of that sort invite future attacks? I think so, and so do many Americans who don't think Kerry-Edwards are unpatriotic, just incompetent.
Increasingly, they are also contenders for the biggest whiners in American political history. Jeez, did they think this was a seventh grade student council election where everyone had to agree not to mention their opponents? The key issue in the election is the conduct of the war. Kerry has called it "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." The president and the vice president can fairly conclude from that statement that Kerry-Edwards would not have fought the war, and thus would have left in places a regime bent on hurting the U.S. and with known ties to terrorists. That's a recipe for more attacks.
The breathless rush to tut-tut Cheney from the usual suspects in old media, and to seize on death 1000 as a contrived occasion on which to "reassess" Iraq, have about them the air of desperation. Here's the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times:
"It is an obvious point at which to ask: To what end are U.S. personnel continuing to die? What is it that commanders should tell their troops as they head into lethal streets?"
To the obvious-only-to-fools question of "to what end" there is a quick and complete answer: Zarqawi and his followers and his imitators. Zarqawi was there before the war, moving without fear of capture or death, planning and provisioning his troops, plotting the deaths of Americans. He's still there, and American troops have to kill or capture him and all like-minded terrorists, because if they are left unmolested, they will gather again into a nest, train another generation of killers, and 9/11, and Bali, and Beslan will repeat again and again.
The really obvious question: How stupid can editorial writers be and still keep their jobs?
The Washington Post has an side baseball account of Kerry's August collapse, but for all the focus on tactics, the weakness of Kerry as a candidate is obvious from the fact that it has now been 38 days since Kerry sat down on camera with a major figure from American journalism for an in-depth interview that would be certain to bring up Kerry's whoppers about his Vietnam service. Kerry's still in the box he built from himself of fables of CIA men and hats and gun-running to Cambodia. The disastrous choice of Edwards as veep-in-waiting was revealed last night when --maybe it was allergies-- the bleary-eyed, peach-faced, five-years-in-Washington came out and declared Richard Cheney to be "un-American." Yeah, that's the sort of stuff that will make terrorists everywhere feel a chill in their spines.
Tony Blankley has a nice summary of the internal problems within Team Kerry, but the overriding problem for Kerry-Edwards is that people do not trust them to fight the global war on terror with anything approaching the discipline that it requires. Every statement Kerry makes adds to the unease with which people view his commitment to fighting the battles as far from our shores as possible, and I hope the vice-president and the president keep returning to this obvious difference between the tickets, no matter how often or loudly John Edwards whines before cameras. |
