Whether or not you like the guy, whether or not you believe he should run for President again, whether or not you think he should have his own special on Comedy Central or anything... you have to admit that he has a big brain and he knows how to use it.
Senator John Kerry made a conscious point of not discussing Mr. Bush's points or policies during his trip abroad, but now that he's back it seems the gloves are off. Here are some choice excerpts from Kerry's guest op-ed piece in this weekend's online Washington Post, which see at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/22/AR2006122201182_pf.html ...
I say this to President Bush as someone who learned the hard way how embracing the world's complexity can be twisted into a crude political shorthand. Barbed words can make for great politics. But with U.S. troops in Iraq in the middle of an escalating civil war, this is no time for politics. Refusing to change course for fear of the political fallout is not only dangerous -- it is immoral.
I'd rather explain a change of position any day than look a parent in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter had to die so that a broken policy could live.
Amen to that, y'all. Sacrificing lives for a necessary evil is one thing. Sacrificing lives for an inflated ego is something entirely different... and something entirely reprehensible.
No one should be looking for vindication in what is happening in Iraq today. The lesson here is not that some of us were right about Iraq or that some of us were wrong. The lesson is simply that we need to change course rapidly rather than perversely use mistakes already made and lives already given as an excuse to make more mistakes and lose even more lives.
When young Americans are being killed and maimed, when the Middle East is on the brink of three civil wars, even the most vaunted "steadfastness" morphs pretty quickly into stubbornness, and resolve becomes recklessness. Changing tactics in the face of changing conditions on the ground, developing new strategies because the old ones don't work, is a hell of a lot smarter than the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again with the same tragic results.
Amen, again. Goddess save us all from the arbitrary Madness of King George.
We cannot afford to waste time being told that admitting mistakes, not the mistakes themselves, will provide our enemies with an intolerable propaganda victory. We've already lost years being told that we have no choice but to stay the course of a failed policy.
This isn't a time for stubbornness, nor is it a time for halfway solutions -- or warmed-over "new" solutions that our own experience tells us will only make the problem worse.
"Gee, honey, this approach of mine didn't work worth a damn last time and it still isn't working worth a damn now. So I think maybe we should keep on doing it for a while longer, don't you?"
Conversation is not capitulation. Until recently, it was widely accepted that good foreign policy demands a willingness to seize opportunities and change policy as the facts change. That's neither flip-flopping nor rudderless diplomacy -- it's strength.
How else could we end up with the famous mantra that "only Nixon could go to China"? For decades, Richard Nixon built his reputation as a China hawk. In 1960, he took John Kennedy to task for being soft on China. He called isolating China a "moral position" that "flatly rejected cowardly expediency." Then, when China broke with the Soviet Union during his presidency, he saw an opportunity to weaken our enemies and make Americans safer. His 1972 visit to China was a major U.S. diplomatic victory in the Cold War.
Ronald Reagan was no shape-shifter, either, but after calling the Soviet Union the "evil empire," he met repeatedly with its leaders. When Reagan saw an opportunity for cooperation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he reached out and tested our enemies' intentions. History remembers that he backed tough words with tough decisions -- and, yes, that he changed course even as he remained true to his principles.
Hey, now, wait a minute. Isn't that the same Ronald Reagan who turned a not-so-very-blind eye while his own governmental minions sold lethal drugs to American kids so they could buy even more lethal guns to give to radical revolutionaries in South America and the Middle East so they could bail out a bunch of kidnapped American civilians while fostering a group of armed thugs that would later turn around and crash planes into the World Trade Center?
Oh, yeah, that Reagan. You know, the one that the Republicans who got b*tch-slapped in '06 are turning back around and claiming that we need to return to the heavenly-anointed values of, the same way they did in '94. That Reagan, the one with the minions who just purely coincidentally of course happen to be back pushing buttons in the White House yet again now. That Reagan, the one who was charismatic and was clueless on the face of it but behind the scenes was as dishonest and manipulative as any Republican president who ever lived. Gee, who'd'a thunk it?
Meanwhile, though, the tall guy who can't tell a joke but knows more about the way things work in the real world than a dozen GWB's even knows how to quote Churchill, too:
President Bush and all of us who grew up in the shadows of World War II remember Winston Churchill -- his grit, his daring, his resolve. I remember listening to his speeches on a vinyl album in the pre-iPod era. Two years ago I spoke about Iraq at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., where Churchill had drawn a line between freedom and fear in his "iron curtain" speech. In preparation, I reread some of the many words from various addresses that made him famous. Something in one passage caught my eye. When Churchill urged, "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in," he added: "except to convictions of honour and good sense."
This is a time for such convictions.
I don't know if Kerry is going to run again or not. Sometimes I think that for his own sake maybe it might better if he didn't. I mean, politics is an ugly ugly business and if he decides to go for it he'd be walking straight back into the fire again. But I'll tell you what, I'm for damn sure glad he's there in the Senate doing the people's business and saying what needs to be said right now.
Better listen up, Boy Georgie. It's time to wake up and smell the coffins here. You don't have a mandate, you never did, and this whole business about you being "the decider" is a pathetic ego-trip riff that you're playing on the dead bodies of people who never deserved the kind of crap that you've been foisting on the world since the day you walked off the ranch in Crawford.
(And hey, one more thing, Georgie boy -- you know that last part about "this is a time for such convictions"? Maybe you should double-check with your buddy Gonzales, don't be surprised if there aren't still a bunch of loopholes left that you can still be prosecuted through. I'm just sayin', ya know?)
{edited after the fact to fix silly tpyos and blockquote tag error, ahem}
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