Posted on 09/08/2004 4:55:47 PM PDT by snopercod
Campaign '04: As in most presidential elections, a through-the-looking-glass quality has taken over this one. Actually, as Sen. John Kerry flails about on the Iraq war, it has sailed straight into the surreal.
Before taking in the Dali-like dreamscape that is the Kerry campaign, voters should soberly study the high-minded standard set by Sen. Zell Miller.
High-minded? According to the punditocracy, the Georgia Democrat who keynoted the Republican National Convention descended to new lows of campaign rhetoric. Why, he even challenged his own party's patriotism.
He did not, of course. But when Miller carefully distinguished between patriotism and judgment, other Democrats and the Commentator Corps whined that Kerry's patriotism had been impugned.
Nobler than Miller's critics could imagine, the Georgian reintroduced Americans to Wendell Wilkie, the 1940 Republican nominee who refused to undermine FDR's foreign policy. To criticize the commander in chief was to give moral support to the enemy.
It's hard to say when the Wilkie Standard broke down. Democrats could argue it started with Dwight D. Eisenhower's promise to go to Korea even as President Truman was waging war there. Richard Nixon notoriously claimed in 1968 he had a plan for ending the Vietnam War as President Johnson agonized over that conflict.
Nixon's challenger four years later, Sen. George McGovern, cried out at his convention: "Come home, America!" Imagine what that did to the U.S. bargaining position with the North Vietnamese.
The difference? The 1972 Democrats demanded withdrawal. Eisenhower and Nixon wanted a more vigorous prosecution of the wars they inherited.
In the three ensuing decades, politicians have thought nothing of criticizing presidential foreign policy even at the most delicate moments. Even young Americans eyeing political careers have thrown themselves into the making of foreign policy. That sometimes puts them in violation of the seldom-enforced Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from engaging in foreign policy.
Wilkie thought the Logan Act's spirit should constrain even presidential candidates. Kerry — who as a young man met privately with Ho Chi Minh's delegates at the Paris peace talks — clearly does not feel so bound. Miller's generation finds it difficult to shade a distinction between such treachery and treason itself.
Why, for example, would a presidential candidate telegraph to our enemies a date by which they can expect withdrawal of our troops? Why would his intellectual supporters ratify such an assault on common sense? But Kerry has said we'll be out in four years, if not before.
For the past several months his campaign promised, Nixon-like, a "plan" to extricate us from Iraq. He and Sen. John Edwards regularly lambast the White House for having "no plan."
Yet no strategy has come into view, not even Wednesday in Cincinnati in what was billed as a major foreign policy address.
The best Kerry could offer was a replay of a line he used a few days ago, to the jeers of veterans, that in Iraq he "would've done almost everything differently." Such a formulation is lame, intellectually disreputable and meant to appeal to voters who pay no attention.
Enough already.
"seldom-enforced Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from engaging in foreign policy. "
Maybe we should start enforcing it!
Ummmmmm I have a question: Is there a statute of limitations on TREASON?
Good question. Of course the RATS think if you don't call what Kerry is doing (and has done) treason, then it's OK because he was just "exercising his First Amendment rights".
I E-mailed IBD on this editorial saying "It's time we armed our teachers."
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