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Related to Kerry's almost complete no-show, I heard a clip of Kerry telling how GW Bush had misled him and the American public into authorizing the use of force in Iraq. This clip provided a very good, but scary, insight into how Kerry's mind works.

Kerry said he voted for the bill but that he had specifically listed what he meant by voting for that bill in his Senate speech. He went on to say that Bush had not fulfilled those enumerated Kerry speech conditions and, therefore, had misled both Kerry and the American people about the use of force in Iraq.

The problem with this argument is that it was the bill, not Kerry's rhetorical filagrees, that authorized GW Bush to do what he did in Iraq. It was the wording of the bill, not Kerry's reasons for voting for the bill, that defined the scope of the president's action in Iraq.

Kerry's comments indicate that for him the most important thing about the bill was his reason for voting for it. This gives insight into the degree of his inflated self-importance. Accordingly, anything that doesn't jibe with Kerry's reasons for voting for the bill, never mind the actual language of the bill, is contrary to the bill. This sort of thinking borders on the pathological.

Now if all these things Kerry had enumerated were SO important that he expected them to be followed by the president as though they had the force of law, then he should have offered them as specific amendments to the bill. But he did not.

Not only this, Kerry claims that since his reasons for voting for the bill weren't followed, GW Bush had been misleading him in asking him for authorization for the use of force in Iraq. Huh? GW Bush was acting within the language of the bill, not within Kerry's wish list about why Kerry was signing the bill. So where's the misleading?

If you look at some other comments Kerry made last week about that bill, you'll see Kerry stated that he and others thought GW Bush was just asking for this authorization in order to placate folks like the Secretary of Defense and that Bush wouldn't actually go ahead and use force. Kerry claims, then, that when GW Bush actually did go ahead and use force in Iraq, he was able to do so by having misled Kerry into thinking that he was going to take the resolution and then do nothing.

So what we have here is a case of one person, GW, clearly stating what he was going to do and why he was going to do it, and another person, Kerry, believing that GW was just saying all these things but was actually planning to do what Kerry wanted. So when what Kerry thought wasn't followed, he claims that the other person had somehow 1. known what he thought, 2. pitched his deal to Kerry based on a mutual, though unspoken, understanding, 3. gotten the okay, and then 4. violated that unspoken understanding, having deliberately misled Kerry into supporting it in the first place.

Do we really need this kind of "mind" in the White House as Commander in Chief? He's too much steeped in the Senate tradition of saying one thing for the record and another thing off the Senate floor, of tradeoffs and ostensible, but not real, support to deal with folks like Osama who say, "We will destroy you" and then set about trying to do it. Kerry and his word games and complexities and nuances need to be left on the curbside with the rest of the trash. It has no place in the Executive Branch.