I'm working on my own little essay on this issue (yeah, I know I've been slow-posting today; but I'm writing as fast as I can), but Hugh Hewitt seems to make an awful lot of good points here:

That's the difference: Bush believes America needs to shape events in the world; Kerry doesn't and, even if he did, because he doesn't know how he'd want to shape them the events would end up shaping him. There would be lots of discussion. Frenchmen would be involved.

Frenchmen would be involved.

Be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Posted by: Ace at 11:58 AM | Comments (1)
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So, John Kerry wants to think of terrorists as "nuisances" -- at least in the future. The full quote:

''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' the article states as the Massachusetts senator's reply.

''As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''

There are a couple of ways to look at this quote.

One could make the case that Kerry thinks of terrorism as a "nuisance," but that plainly isn't fair. It's partisan and hack and tendentious. He's talking about getting to the point where terrorism stops being mega-terrorism and becomes something we suffer through occasionally, as we did under Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton.

I suppose that's fair enough-- Bush may not say it, but most likely he doesn't figure that victory in the War on Terror will result in a complete abandonment of the tactic of terrorism.

But the quote is nonetheless very troubling.

The suspicion on the right is that the left isn't so much concerned with actually defeating terrorism as it is determined to defeat terrorism as an important political issue. Example: Bill Clinton's appeasement of North Korea didn't actually end North Korea's nuclear weapons program, as we all now know (and in fact which we knew at the time, too). Bill Clinton's appeasement was not a strategic victory, but it was a political victory-- North Korea continued trying to build nukes, but it wasn't reported on the front pages of the newspapers anymore.

We didn't achieve our national goal with respect to North Korea-- we achieved only Bill Clinton's short-term goal of being able to claim that we'd solved it, thereby removing it as an issue from the public debate. They didn't stop building nukes; they just did so secretly, with US connivance. They pretended (barely) to have halted building atomic bombs and we pretended we believed them. This didn't serve the national interest, but it did serve the interests of the Democratic Party.

What bothers me most about Kerry -- and the liberal Democratic Party generally -- is that it seems to take the same tact on Al Qaeda terrorism. They seem less concerned with the issue of terrorism than they seem bothered by the fact that terrorism is an issue-- and an issue that does not play to their political advantage. Kerry's various statements about the threat of terrorism being exaggerated, of being "uncomfortable" calling the War on Terrorism a "war" at all, seem to be gaffes of the Michael Kinsley variety-- i.e., making the mistake of saying what you actually believe.

I'm also very bothered by all this talk of an "exit strategy." An exit strategy, near as I can tell, is a condition which is well short of actual victory -- well short of actually achieving a military goal -- but which allows us all to "declare victory" and go home. "Exit strategy" is just a euphemism for "situation allowing us to pretend we've won."

I never understood the idea of the need for an "exit strategy." After all, if the military goal you seek to accomplish is so secondary or even trivial that you are planning, from the get-go, a face-saving exit short of victory, why were you fighting the war in the first place? It seems to me that if you're going to war, then that war should be a serious business, not some minor little scrape you're willing to half-heartedly fight and then pretend you've won and go back home.

If a war is worth fighting at all, shouldn't actual victory -- the actual achieving of the goals announced before the war -- be the only exit strategy you're willing to contemplate (absent factors that may turn out show the war is unwinnable, etc.)?

What I keep hearing from Democrats -- they don't actually say this, but I hear it nonetheless -- is "Please tell us when we can stop with all this terrible nasty business of fighting wars and killing terrorists. We don't like it. We're willing to go along for a while, because it seems politically popular with the rubes, but honestly, you have to give us a date certain at which point we can stop all this boystuff and get back to the issues that 'really matter,' like health-care."

And John Kerry's statement about getting back to the good old days of "terrorism as a nuisance" seems of a piece with that subtext. He doesn't seem interested in winning so much as he seems like he wants a Nixonian Decent Interval.

Bush and Kerry have two very different schedules for this war. Bush says, and believes I think, that we must fight this war until it is actually won. This is a scary thought-- but even if this turns out to be an intergenerational struggle like the Cold War, it is too important to lose. No matter what the costs, we must win.

Kerry, on the other hand, seems to be addicted to setting conditions for the quick declaration of peace. He foresees not a victory but a meaningless little scrap of paper signed by the likes of Yasser Arafat -- something which is not a victory, and yet can be spun as a victory by Jamie Rubin and Dan Rather.

Posted by: Ace at 10:22 AM | Comments (4)
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I didn't cover this before, as everyone else did, and besides, there have been forgeries along these lines in the past.

Nevertheless, these documents, if verified as real, seem to paint a much different picture of Saddam's Iraq than Michael Moore and the MSM would have you believe.

Thanks to Ogre Gunner-- once again, when a guy naming himself Ogre Gunner sends you a link, you fucking post that link if you know what's good for you.

Posted by: Ace at 10:04 AM | Comments (1)
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This is probably a little too inside-baseball and bloggy for most, but hey, I've been yammering about this for going on eleven months now. It's great that someone else has finally twigged on to how emotional and hyberbolic Sullivan is.

Posted by: Ace at 08:41 AM | Comments (13)
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Seriously, just don't.

Posted by: Ace at 02:58 PM | Comments (12)
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Don't accuse me of breaking open the champagne. I'm not. I don't even like champagne.

Everyone knows what the polls say and what I'm going to say is freaking obvious, but I'm going to say it anyway, because it's pleasing to say.

Even after the very best debate performance John Kerry could have hoped for, and the worst performance from Bush he could have wished for, the man still seems to be behind by 3 or 4 points. This new ABCNews polls says 4.

Whatever it is from 1 to 4 points -- Bush has a persistent, thusfar unerodable advantage over Kerry, and he can't seem to lose that advantage, even when he very nearly tries to.

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (14)
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...and he still wants to know: If John Kerry is so down on "tax cuts for the rich," why did he choose to pay the lower state tax rate in Massachusetts, rather than the voluntarily-selected higher tax rate?

I'd like to know too.

You know who doesn't want to know?

Mark Fucking Halperin, that's who.

Posted by: Ace at 02:23 PM | Comments (13)
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John Kerry seemed to be pretty down on the sneak & peek provisions of the Patriot Act during the last debate.

Blaster does what the media is too responsible and too professional to do, and actually bothers doing a little fact checking.

Guess what he found?

Stupid, partisan, untrained blogger.

Posted by: Ace at 02:12 PM | Comments (3)
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FreeRepublic has posted this article, showing Kerry with a pitiful 9-point lead among Hispanics.

For comparison: In July, Kerry was winning Hispanics 2-1; Gore won Hispanics 62 to 35.

On the other hand, the much-heralded mass Jewish defection from the Democratic Party appears to be have at least a few more years of heralding to go:

It is the dog that did not bark in the night: After flirting with President George W. Bush in the two years following Sept.11, 2001, America's Jews have flooded back to the Democrats by an almost 3-to-1 ratio.

A poll released in late September by the New York-based American Jewish Committee showed 69 percent of the country's estimated 6.1 million Jews preparing to vote for Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic Party presidential nominee, and 24 percent backing Bush.

"Republican claims of making major inroads in the Jewish community
remind me of the boy who cried wolf," said Democratic political
consultant Steve Rabinowitz, head of the Washington-based Rabinowitz Associates. "Once again, it appears there has been no significant movement in Jewish political loyalties as polling day approaches.

Let me talk to Jewish voters in a way they'll understand:

Oh, sure, you Mr. Big-Shot with your college education and your history of voting-for-Democrats. For this I worked my fingers to the bone in the garment industry? It's a shande, a shande I say. My hand to God, I'm happy your Aunt Phyllis died three years ago so she would not have to see the shame of this. It's messugenah. Shemen zikh mit.

So, it is what it is. Don't you go voting for George Bush; don't do me any favors. I'll just roll up over here in the corner and die, God forbid I should open my mouth and be heard. Auf yenems tuchus gehen schmeissen. Go beat on someone else's ass, why don't you.

PS: Wear a sweater. It's getting chilly now and you don't want to catch your death of cold.

Posted by: Ace at 11:24 AM | Comments (48)
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Next time some liberal slams the blogosphere or Drudge for reporting on the mystery object Kerry drew out of his jacket during the first debate (it turned out to be a fountain pen, of course), gently remind them that the newspaper of liberal record frequently traffics in internet-borne conspiracy-theorizing -- so long as the internet conspiracy theories in question attack the right people.

Posted by: Ace at 11:05 AM | Comments (2)
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