Kerry's Shifts: Nuanced Ideas or Flip-Flops?

NY Times ^ | March6, 2004 | DAVID M. HALBFINGER

[FairOpinion]

"And on Friday the Republican National Committee e-mailed to reporters an Internet boxing game called "Kerry vs. Kerry" designed, the committee said, to highlight the senator's "multiple positions on multiple issues."

I'd like to see that e-mail.

The closing sentence: "...I'd let Americans decide which in the end is closer to what they need in a president, in a complex world where if you get it really wrong there are enormous consequences." is what people need to think about. Can you trust Kerry with life and death decisions of the American people? I don't think so.

[raloxk]

"When Senator John Kerry was speaking to Jewish leaders a few days ago, he said Israel's construction of a barrier between it and Palestinian territories was a legitimate act of self-defense. But in October, he told an Arab-American group that it was "provocative and counterproductive" and a "barrier to peace.""

I just have to believe that this guy is going to implode at some point

[evad]

Kerry's Shifts: Nuanced Ideas or Flip-Flops?

Neither..
just plain lies.

[Southack]

I'm surprised that the NY Times ran this marginally unbiased article, but not surprised that since they did choose to run it that they buried it on their low-readership Saturday edition...

[binger]

[Shermy]

It's simple.

He's a liar.

Is that nuanced enough?

[Always Right]

Some aides and close associates say Mr. Kerry's fluidity is the mark of an intellectual who grasps the subtleties of issues

Fluidity????? ROTFL. Kerry goes from one extreme to the other at a drop of the hat.

[punster]

"It's simple.

He's a liar."

Simplicity is the mark of eloquence.

What it means is neither side can trust him, he will knife them in the back if it is advantageous for his political ambitions.

[Shermy]

Nuanced...NY Times...nuanced...NY Times...sounds familiar...

Dean Formulates a Nuanced Approach to Foreign Policy
Posted on 12/20/2003 10:44:09 AM PST by Dr. Marten

Naturally Mark Steyn is on top of this
Mark Steyn: John Kerry is all tied up in nuances

[jonascord]

In a two-holer, he will dump in his drawers before he will commit to which one to sit on. Just we we need, another indecisive idiot. Only this time, it's the United States who gets shat on.

[FairOpinion]

Mark Steyn can always see right throught the "nuances".

Here is a "30 round match" of Kerry vs. Kerry at the RNC, in a cartoon format.

http://www.gop.com/kerryvskerry/

I would like to see a summary, which would be easier to post, but this may be more dramatic.

[avenir]

Bush replied: "I don't do nuance."

Works for me.

[boop]

Interesting how all the "sources" interviewed by the unbiased reporter were all democrats.

[EGPWS]

Neither..
just plain lies.

You beat me to it, however if I may, I'll add to your insight.

A lack of conviction and direction.

[EGPWS]

Hey, your post includes a picture of a man with two faces! ; )

...and stereo microphones to boot!

[SunkenCiv]

And that's from the NY Times! It's not lookin' good for mealy-mouthed, un-nuanced, unsophisticated liars in general nowadays.

Two of my coworkers were in the office tonight. One, my friend, is a partisan Democrat. He stated that if Bush gets back in, "ain't none of us gonna have jobs." We work at a drug rehab (a non-profit), and GWB asked Congress for $600 million for drug rehabilitation in the 2003 State of the Union.

But anyway, my other coworker ignored him the first couple of times he said this. I did also (he'd brought in the new "Star", and I was ogling female celebrities). Then she said, Bush was going to be reelected. This is not something I had expected her to say.

Maybe Bush will win Michigan... ;')

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Kerry's World: Father Knows Best***From the start, Richard Kerry turned his oldest son into his foreign policy protégé. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas has written, "The Kerry dinner table was a nightly foreign-policy seminar. While other boys were eating TV dinners in front of the tube, [John] Kerry was discussing George Kennan's doctrine of containment." His father introduced the adolescent boy to such luminaries as Monnet and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Later, when he was at Yale, John Kerry traded letters with Clementine Churchill, Winston's wife.

As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning, "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism."

If Richard and John Kerry were not in perfect political sync, it was because the father, in an inversion of the usual dynamic, was more radical than the son. John Kerry, for instance, had grown enthusiastic about John F. Kennedy and his robust, anti-communist foreign policy. Indeed, it was his fervor for Kennedy's "bear any burden" call to service that largely inspired Kerry to join the Navy. Richard Kerry, by contrast, was more skeptical about New Frontier idealism. In a 1996 interview with The Boston Globe, he groused, "[John's] attitude was gung ho: had to show the flag. He was quite immature in that direction." When John Kerry came back from Vietnam, his father pushed him to be more outspoken in his opposition to the war. "When Kerry refused to speak out against the government [while in uniform], suddenly his father felt like he was being a wimp," says Brinkley. "[So he] encouraged his son to take off the uniform and to become a critic."

John Kerry, of course, did exactly this, first in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and eventually in the U.S. Senate. From the moment he arrived in Washington, Kerry promised that "issues of war and peace" would remain his passion. And, from the start, this meant that he would criticize Ronald Reagan's war against communism, especially when it was fought through proxies in the jungles of Central America. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandanista government, telling The Washington Post, "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell [the Sandinistas] what to do." Soon after his return, he pressured Congress into investigating the administration's illegal funding of the Contra rebels, opening a trail that culminated in the exposure of the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. And, a few years later, in the late '80s, he repeated this success, launching an investigation that revealed that another of the administration's favorite anti-communists, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, had been deeply enmeshed in drug-trafficking. Kerry was also skeptical enough of U.S. power that he voted against authorizing a popular intervention -- the Gulf war -- and opposed a 1995 resolution that would have allowed the arming of Bosnians. ***

[squidly]

Mr. Kerry's fluidity is the mark of an intellectual who grasps the subtleties of issues, inhabits their nuances and revels in the deliberative process

hehe, It just doesn't get any better than this.

[ApplegateRanch]

I wonder why Pillory's "home town" paper didn't mention this BEFORE Super Tuesday?

[NYCVirago]

"Between the moral clarity, black and white, good and evil of George Bush that distorts and gets reality wrong," he said, "and someone who quotes a French philosopher, André Gide, saying, `Don't try to understand me too much,' I'd let Americans decide which in the end is closer to what they need in a president, in a complex world where if you get it really wrong there are enormous consequences.

That's just what we need -- a president who quotes French philosophers. And that quote essentially means, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." Sheesh!