What wrong with these guys?


We know why the Bushies "can't understand" Kerry's position on Iraq, but what's wrong with Chris "if I couldn't think in clichés I couldn't think" Mathews of Hardball? He's going after the Bushies for distorting a Kerry statement made on his precious show, while at the same time pretending he can't get a straight answer from Kerry---concluding that Kerry isn't a flip-flopper, he's wishy-washy. And a GOPer guest who professes to be or have been a journalist "can't understand" Kerry's position on his vote to authorize the President to use force as a last resort in Iraq, even though a campaign aide to Howard Dean explained it quite clearly while he was sitting there.

Kerry's position is that he voted to give the President the backing needed to get Saddam to take weapons inspections seriously---which was working, by the way, right up to the minute that Bush decided the fact that the inspectors weren't finding weapons meant Saddam really had them, and started bombing. If inspections were blocked, then the authorization of force would focus allies on the question of what to do to compel Saddam to cooperate with inspectors.
Kerry also expected of a President of either party that he would go to war only as a last resort, and only with thorough plans for the aftermath, etc.

Why is that so difficult to understand? No, he didn't vote For the War. He voted to give the President what he said he needed to rid Iraq of WMDs. He didn't say, let's invade Iraq, no matter what those cheese eating surrender monkeys want! He didn't vote to bomb, or invade, or to torture, and he's certainly not now crowing that it doesn't matter if the purpose of the war was a sham, it was a good thing anyway.

So why doesn't Kerry just say that he regrets his vote now---that essentially he shouldn't have trusted Bush's competence or veracity? It would be politically advantageous to do so. It seems pretty obvious from his answer the other day---that no, he thinks his vote was right because a President ought to have had that authority---that the reason he isn't repudiating his vote to give the president authorization to use force, is he wants that kind of flexibility for himself if he is President, though he makes clear he would use it in a far different way. If he says now that the president should be denied such authority, it would be used against him if he asked for it while president. It's the big stick that allows the president to speak softly, to use diplomacy in the real world.

It's no secret to our readers that we opposed giving Bush that authorization, that we suspected he would misuse it, that he and his ideologically rigid and simplistically zealous advisors were bent on war no matter what, that they had no plan and no clue about the aftermath, or the effect of invasion on the region. We more or less predicted it all, so how hard could it have been? Still, while we believe that Congress should have voted against authorizing force, we are pretty damn sure Bush would have gone to war anyway (which is to say, if he hadn't had the votes to begin with, he never would have taken the matter to Congress. He would have found or created the pretext to act on his own authority.) And we are not so taken with force authorizations as a policy for the future. We would like to see the United States institute a Department of Peace.

Our position on these matters differs from Kerry's, but we understand his position, and find it honorable. We can live with it, and we do mean that in several senses.

Now...what's up with John McCain? How can he call for the Bushies to condemn the attack on Kerry's Vietnam leadership and heroism, and when they don't, he campaigns with Bush in Florida anyway? Now he's questioning the Bush plan to take troops out of South Korea and Europe, but he's still the main speaker at the GOP convention?

Supporting a candidate who doesn't agree with all of your policy positions is understandable. But one whose integrity you've questioned? Who you have called to account, and who ignores you? We're beginning to wonder about John McCain.