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.)
REALITY: Meanwhile, the somewhat surreal description of the world assumed by the Bush camp keeps getting tarnished by, well, the facts. The deficit is a serious problem, and will only get a lot worse in a second Bush term, and far, far worse thereafter. We are ceding territory in Iraq in several major regions. 1,000 military deaths is arguably a price a nation has to pay for a necessary war. But Americans will get far less tolerant of the losses if they perceive that the war isn’t being won, or if they do not see a credible way forward. The problem with Bush’s convention strategy is that it portrayed a world in which everything was going splendidly. But if events intervene and prove that not to be the case, won’t Bush seem dangerously complacent and out of touch? In some ways, Bush has made himself more vulnerable to terrorist attacks in Iraq. By declaring that his war-leadership is an undiluted triumph, some hideous massacre or series of attacks on soldiers in Iraq could undermine public confidence in his leadership more than if he’d been more candid about the risks involved and the difficulties we face. We found out that Kerry’s superb convention wasn’t quite as accomplished in retrospect. We may find the same with Bush’s.
ZELL’S LIES: More substantiation of the deceptions parlayed by Senator Miller.
OUR BLESSED LEADER: Here’s Michael Novak, putting some purplish touches to Republican prose in National Review:
Let me close by mentioning one other perception I took away from my exciting four days of stirring speeches from truly distinguished leaders: Among all of them, the greatest of all and the most reliable, focused, disciplined, plain-speaking, and trustworthy was our president. He stood with some great ones, but his moral stature rose at least a shoulder’s height above all the others. He stood the steadiest of all.
No, that wasn’t a recent quote from an obscure North Korean sports stadium. Readers are invited to send in suck-uppery of either Kerry or Bush in this ra-ra campaign.
THE BOOK ON MALKIN: Some interesting and devastating scholarly critiques of Michelle Malkin’s new book defending the internment of the Japanese in World War II can be read here and here.
The Dish 