Posted on 09/29/2004 9:15:06 PM PDT by quidnunc
Tonight, in the season's first presidential debate, Messrs. Bush and Kerry will mix it up on foreign policy. Do not expect to depart the debate with a clearer notion of Kerry's views on foreign policy in general or on Iraq in particular.
On foreign policy, Kerry is essentially a peacenik, bring-the-boys-home isolationist who would relinquish U.S. leadership in the world to the UN. He has said Vietnam still heavily influences his foreign-policy views. From the left, he consistently criticized President Reagan's prosecution of the Cold War. He termed the U.S. invasion of Grenada a "bully's show of force" (a position he now says he has reversed). Regarding Nicaragua, he opposed funding for the anti-Communist Contras and as in the early 1970s, when he met in Paris with representatives of Ho Chi Minh he went south of the border to meet with Nicaragua's Communist dictator, Daniel Ortega.
In 1991, Kerry voted against the first Gulf War. Earlier, he had backed the nuclear freeze movement. Indeed, throughout the 1980s, he voted repeatedly against new generations of weapons, such as the B-1 and B-2 bombers, the Apache attack helicopter, and the Patriot air-defense missile votes he subsequently has termed "ill-advised."
And on the second Gulf war, Saddam Hussein, WMDs, and the War on Terrorism, Kerry has been all over the landscape. The leftist, and anti-Bush, New Republic magazine notes that on Iraq Kerry has moved from "inscrutable" to "indefensible."
Let's look at the strange Kerry rhetorical oeuvre
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at timesdispatch.com ...
Hey Manny, so let me get this right, I give you check writing privileges at the House Bank and you can deliver to me how many pounds of Peruvian....
Kerry's penchant for talking to the enemy, and further doing so outside normal diplomatic channels is, as BJ would say, "chilling".
One imagines that if the public does not go along with him on what he wants, he'll be outside cutting his own personal deals with tyrants. And screwing our troops and the country in the process.
Also interesting that's it's always our country that ends up on the short end of the flip flop shaft from Kerry, it's "I was against Daniel Ortega before I voted for him", or "I was against Ho Chi Minh before I voted for him".
At heart, Kerry has always voted for our enemies and his votes were always, in his preferred, final version, against the US and our soldiers.
For any Freepers that use file sharing programs, do a search for Kerry. There is a great video, about 12 minutes long, that show his flip flops going back for years.
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