It's All In the Nuance

John Kerry promises that he would fight a smarter, more effective war in Iraq, but he's having enough trouble simply bringing his vaunted intelligence to bear in the current political struggle. He seems to blurt out whatever strikes him as useful at the moment, which almost always proves embarrassing to him later. He has claimed, for instance, that Bush had banned stem cell research, that he (Kerry) had met with representatives of the U.N. Security Council about the pending invasion of Iraq, that Bush bungled the supervision of explosives in al QaQaa, all of which claims have turned out to be erroneous.

Senator Kerry is undeterred, however, by the fact that he seems so inept at getting the facts right. He staggers from one canard to the next, blithely indifferent to the tenuous relationship any of his yarns have with reality and completely unmindful of what his mendacity tells us about his character.

Today he delivered this piece of historical buffoonery from the stump in Toledo:

"When the Bay of Pigs went sour, John Kennedy had the courage to look America in the eye and say, `I take responsibility, it's my fault," Kerry said, referring to the bungled invasion of Cuba in 1961. "John Kennedy knew how to take responsibility for the mistakes he made and Mr. President, it's long since time for you to start taking responsibility for the mistakes you made."

Let's see. Deposing Saddam, liberating 25 million people from oppression, and resolutely taking the first early steps to establishing democracy in the heart of the Arab world is, in the mind of the Senator, analogous to a president (John Kennedy) getting cold feet prior to the Cuba invasion and sending thousands of Cuban guerrillas to a pointless death because Kennedy decided at the last minute to withhold the air cover they had been promised.

Not only is the Senator's comparison of the Bay of Pigs with Iraq about as perverse as it can be, Mr. Kerry insists upon serving up this sublime specimen of asininity while the votes of the Cuban-American community in Florida, from whose ranks those dead were drawn, hang in the balance. Moreover, he implicitly reminds them that it was the Democratic president that Kerry models himself after whose dithering was responsible for their slaughter.

This may all seem very smart to the liberals who pride themselves on being so much more intelligent than the rest of us. It may even be an example of the Senator's much celebrated nuanced thinking. But, frankly, we don't see how what the Senator said today can be considered anything other than just stupid.