Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
We're taking a risk on either Bush or Kerry. Even if you think that Bush has the right foreign-policy inclinations -- and I don't -- he keeps screwing things up. E.g., reasonable minds can differ about whether invading Iraq was the right thing to do, but not without a plan.
On the criticisms of Kerry, I think Republicans like to tell themselves that 9/11 changed everything, but that Democrats didn't get the message. As we've discussed ad nauseum on this board, Bush plainly did not give much attention to the threat posed by Al Qaeda before 9/11. Y'all give him credit, not unreasonably, for changing his priorities thereafter. Yet you look at Kerry's record before 9/11 and pretend that he would go back to that time. I understand why this is appealing as propaganda, but if you really believe it then you're not being serious.
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Even if we say that Kerry's pre 9/11 record is irrelevent, and I don't think it is, what about his post 9/11 record? I know you like to justify it all sorts of ways, but he voted against $87 million in funding after saying that anyone who did that was not fit to be president. He's said Iraq is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, while troops are in harm's way. He's ridiculed the leadership of Iraq while Allawi was a guest of the US. He's belittled our allies who have joined the coalition. He's said that our foreign policy going forward would be governed by some amorphous "global test," which, giving him the benefit of the doubt, does not mean a veto by our allies, but I'm not sure what that means. He's made other statements suggesting that this "war" should be fought, more like the war on drugs, as a matter of global law enforcement. All of these statements are post 9/11 and cause for great concern.
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