Posted on 09/04/2004 5:44:17 AM PDT by visagoth
Both candidates gave speeches late on Thursday night. George W. Bush was more or less expected to. John Kerry didn't have to, but reported for duty even though nobody wanted him to. Unnerved by sagging numbers, he decided to start the post-Labor Day phase of the campaign three days before Labor Day. The way things are going, Democrats seem likely to be launching the post-election catastrophic-defeat vicious-recriminations phase of the campaign round about Sept. 12.
At any rate, less than 60 minutes after President Bush gave a sober, graceful, droll and moving address, Kerry decided to hit back. In the midnight hour, he climbed out of his political coffin, and before his thousands of aides could grab the garlic from Teresa's kitchen and start waving it at him, he found himself in front of an audience and started giving a speech. As in Vietnam, he was in no mood to take prisoners: ''I have five words for Americans,'' he thundered. ''This is your wake up call!''
Is that five words? Or is it six? Well, it's all very nuanced, according to whether you hyphenate the ''wake-up.'' Maybe he should have said, ''I have four words plus a common hyphenated expression for Americans.'' I'd suggest the rewrite to him personally, but I don't want him to stare huffily at me and drone, "How dare you attack my patriotism."
By about nine words into John Kerry's wake up call, I was sound asleep again. But this was what he told Ohio's brave band of chronic insomniacs:
''For the past week, they attacked my patriotism and my fitness to serve as commander in chief. Well, here's my answer. I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve.''
Oh, dear . . . growing drowsy again . . . losing the will to type . . . what's he saying now?
''Two tours of duty''
Ah, yes. As usual, he has four words for Americans: I served in Vietnam. Or five words if you spell it Viet Nam.
So we have one candidate running on a platform of ambitious reforms for an ''ownership society'' at home and a pledge to hunt down America's enemies abroad. And we have another candidate running on the platform that no one has the right to say anything mean about him.
And for this the senator broke the eminently civilized tradition that each candidate lets the other guy have his convention week to himself? Maybe they need to start scheduling those Kerry campaign shakeups twice a week.
There was an old joke back in the Cold War:
Proud American to Russian guy: ''In my country every one of us has the right to criticize our president.''
Russian guy: ''Same here. In my country every one of us has the right to criticize your president.''
That seems to be the way John Kerry likes it. Americans should be free to call Bush a moron, a liar, a fraud, a deserter, an agent of the House of Saud, a mass murderer, a mass rapist (according to the speaker at a National Organization for Women rally last week) and the new Hitler (according to just about everyone). But how dare anyone be so impertinent as to insult John Kerry! No one has the right to insult Kerry, except possibly Teresa, and only on the day she gives him his allowance.
Several distinguished analysts have suggested that the best rationale for a Kerry presidency is that it would be a ''return to normalcy'' -- a quiet life after the epic pages of history George W. Bush has been writing these last three years. Even if a ''return to normalcy'' were an option, I doubt whether John Kerry would qualify. As we saw in those two Thursday speeches, Bush takes the war seriously but he doesn't take himself seriously -- self-deprecating jokes are obligatory these days, but try to imagine Kerry doing the equivalent of Bush's gags about mangled English and swaggering. The president is comfortable in his own skin, which is why he shrugs off the Hitler stuff. By contrast, Kerry doesn't take the war seriously because he's so busy taking himself seriously. If ''return to normalcy'' means four years of a grimly humorless, touchy, self-regarding Kerry presidency, I'll take the war.
That's surely why Kerry is running his kamikaze kandidacy on biography rather than any grand themes. Senator Kerrikaze is running for president because he thinks he should be president -- who needs a platform? One of the most revealing aspects of the campaign this last week were the interviews given by his various surrogates. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman, went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show and was asked about the swift boat veterans' ads, and he laughed and blustered and stalled and floundered. That sounded weird. This thing's been going on a month now, and the Kerry campaign still hasn't come up with a form of words to deflect questions about it. If they had an agreed spin, McAuliffe and Co. would be out using it. But the seared senator feels it's lese majeste even to question him. He can talk about Vietnam 24/7, but nobody else is allowed to bring it up.
Sorry, man, that's not the way it works. And if he thinks it does, he's even further removed from the realities of democratic politics than he was from the interior of Cambodia. Instead of those military records the swift boat vets are calling for, I'd be more interested in seeing his medical ones.
As for Bush, to be sure at one level his convention was a ''soft-focus infomercial,'' just as Kerry's was. But the infomercial came into sharp focus just often enough to clarify, piercingly, the differences between the parties. On opening night in Boston, the Democrats staged a tasteful, teary candlelight remembrance of those who died on 9/11. On opening night in New York, the Republicans put up one speaker after another -- John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Ron Silver -- resolved that those thousands of innocents shall not have died in vain.
I remember a couple of days after Sept. 11 writing that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, the two conventions drew the same distinction. If you want passivity and wallowing in victim culture, the Dems will do. If you want to win this thing, Bush is the only guy running.
My nomination for the Quote of the Week. Nicely done!
Kerry would never take advice. To paraphrase Elwood Blues, he's on a mission from Ego.
Excellent! Made me laugh! Series, I'd take the Kirby first. Lot more effective in cleaning up dirt; with less maintenance and overhead.
Haven't seen any reference to Alzheimer's, but Kerry's problem could be much simpler: You don't forget things that are important to you. And nothing and nobody is important to Kerry except himself!
You wrote:
"''This is your wake up call!''
Is that five words? Or is it six?"
America only needs two words for John Kerry.
;-)
You wrote:
"Susan Estrich is now saying the libs have to go not just negative, but dirty. Such as, do the American people really know their President is an alcoholic, that Bush's girlfriend had an abortion, that Laura Bush killed her boyfriend in a car crash, etc."
Sounds more like the Kennedy family biography.
Oh, Kennedy is from Massachusetts just like Kewwy.
How do you dope up, a dope? Do you want Dork to OD? Then he'd out-Lurch, Lurch.
Kerry's in deep, Deep doodoo, and will say and do anything to keep his base's attention, so he'll get at least a few liberal votes, and to keep the contributions flowing.
Amazing that with all the money Kerry's been taking in, and spending, the huge Soros money base backing him, plus the covert millions Terayza's putting out, that a teeny tiny SBV $250K ad started Kerry's collapse, while Bush's convention finished Kerry off.
FWIW, my take on Kerry's near panicked midnight rally, after Bush's speech, is not that it was a reaction to the GOP convention, rather, it was a desperate pre-emptive stike against what is still to come from the SBVFT.
> Kerry just keeps owning himself everytime he opens his
> mouth. I think the UNFIT sticks - and he oughta wear it.
Unfit to Command
Unfit to Campaign, too
It was hard to pick out one phrase to discuss........all of Steyn's phrases are gems.
Where the heck have they been hiding Mrs. Ketchup anyway. I was looking forward to some really funny moments of her kicking John FN's butt in public. Like a circus bear that gets out of control.
I missed the author's name before reading the article. Just part of the way through it, I was thinking, "Wow! Has this guy nailed it, or what? He is as great as Mark Steyn!"
Silly me. It was Mark Steyn!!
> John Kerry knows that he didn't serve a Tour,
> let alone TWO Tours, in Vietnam ...
"Tour of Duty"
The fiction begins with the title.
Or: that title can only be truthful if Kerry was a tourist.
Use either of these lines when people bring up the book,
and let them ask you what you mean.
Kerry cannot count tours any better than he can count his words.
Here's another goodie:
Still whining, Kerry running out of time
A Boston Herald editorial
Saturday, September 4, 2004
It's time John Kerry chooses between being a whiner and being a leader. His midnight performance Thursday and remarks at events Friday showed he's yet to get the difference in this campaign.
Americans do not want to hear Kerry's whining about being ``attacked'' and ``insulted'' at the Republican National Convention. Americans do not want to hear his childish claims that he was attacked first and therefore he now must attack back. Americans do not want to hear the Democratic nominee call the commander in chief during a war where American lives are on the line ``unfit for office and unfit for duty.''
They want to hear that he is as committed as President Bush to stopping fanatics from taking over American schools and slaughtering children. And if he has better ideas about how to go about doing it than Bush does, Americans want to hear those, too.
For this is what we are facing. Anyone thinking the Russian school massacre couldn't happen here underestimates the lack of moral conscience
which exists in the likes of al-Qaeda, Hamas and other extremists.
Partisan Democrats, with an air of intellectual superiority, sniff that terror is a tactic, not a cause.
They do so to imply that President Bush and his supporters don't even understand the nature of the world's dangers, never mind the correct means to protect against them.
President Bush left no doubt that he understands completely in his acceptance speech Thursday night. ``If America shows uncertainty or weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.''
We bet John Kerry would like to have his Thursday microphone-clutching performance for the cameras back given the Russian horror.
His complaints about attacks on his patriotism (as opposed to the voting record critique we heard) would be merely annoying if played only against the backdrop of a political contest. But the larger contest - between liberty and tyranny, between good and evil - is the challenge against which Kerry's and Bush's leadership will be measured. And on that score, Kerry's thin-skin and oft-used tactic of claiming he's forced to attack because of unfair smears is not only unimpressive, it's offensive. And it's about time someone called him on it.
Defining differences is what campaigns are all about.
George W. Bush told the country in no uncertain terms what he will do in a second term. And he told the country how his beliefs and record differ from Kerry's.
That's just what Zell Miller did. That's just what Dick Cheney did. That's just what Rudy Giuliani did.
Stop whining, Senator, and start telling voters why you believe you're right and these men are wrong.
We saw that when he was soooo drunk at his own rally ;o)
Was 'surfing' through MSNBC last night. Oberman(sp) was doing a replay of Gore....er Kerry's midnight speech. And at the top left corner of the screen was a cartoon Dracula!
If the liberals at MSNBC are mocking Kerry before Labor Day, can you imagine what they will be doing to him by Haloween?
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