Jake and me and a whole load of others.
ROVE IN OHIO: Watch what the Mayberry Machiavelli is up to. New Donkey has some insights.
NO DECLINISM: Carroll Andrew Morse doesn’t believe that John Kerry can bring us to “victory” over Jihadist terrorism. But he never defines “victory.” Can it mean the death of every single Jihadist on the globe? I’d love it to, but no serious person thinks that’s going to happen. Does he mean winning the war in Iraq? Well, Kerry says he intends to. You may think he’s incapable of such, but that’s a different argument than one about intent or will. Then Morse cites – again! – the Kerry quote from Matt Bai and equates it with Arthur Schlesinger’s view that we can live with “minor” terrorism. I begin to despair of the abuse of this Kerry quote. There is a distinction in the English language between the present and the future tense, a distinction apparently lost on many Kerry critics. I know this distinction might be dismissed as dreaded “nuance,” but what Kerry clearly said is that he wants us to get to the point in the future when terrorism is merely a “nuisance.” Given our inability to end it entirely – an inability conceded by this president many times – I’ll take that as victory. Look, it’s just rhetorical silliness to say we can end terror as a tactic for ever. It’s been around from the beginning of time and always will be. What we can do is crush organized Jihadist terrorism and try and bring about a democratic space in the Arab Islamic world so that Islamism loses political traction. Both candidates agree on that. It’s just that one candidate – in the most important test of his capacities so far – has obviously messed up dramatically. Morse wants to reward such incompetence and then pretends he’s a hawk. If he were really a hawk, he would not be ignoring Bush’s real failures and impugning Kerry’s imagined ones. If you care about ending Jihadist terrorism, ask yourself: can we afford four more years like the last year in Iraq? How many more Abu Ghraibs? How many more Fallujas? How many more al Qa Qaas? How many more debacles before we actually lose? The reason I’m for Kerry is that I want to win. And I refuse to ignore reality.
CHUTZPAH AWARD: “The role of a president is to confront problems, not to pass them on to future generations and future presidents,” – president Bush, attacking Kerry, yes, Kerry, on fiscal irresponsibility. Does he have any shame? Or does he simply have no idea what his own fiscal legacy is?
The Dish 