Free Republic

PARIS - Sen. John Kerry [related, bio] will meet Friday with French President Jacques Chirac, U.S. and French officials said. The Massachusetts Democrat who lost the November election to incumbent President Bush [related, bio] has relatives in France and speaks French. Kerry's stop in Paris was part of a trip to Europe and the Middle East, the U.S. Embassy in Paris said Thursday. Kerry was also to meet with French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier. The senator's office in Washington did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Visiting with U.S. troops in Baghdad on Thursday, failed presidential candidate John Kerry trashed Commander-in-chief George Bush for making "horrendous judgments" and "unbelievable blunders" that have undermined the war effort. In a series of demoralizing comments first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, the defeated Democrat griped, "What is sad about what's happening here now is that so much of it is a process of catching up from the enormous miscalculations and wrong judgments made in the beginning." Kerry said that because of the Bush administration's mistakes, "the job has been made enormously harder." Among the errors cited by the...