A war that will “bring the world to our side”? I guess doing the right thing regardless of what others do is not in the Kerry Moral Code. Unless I am mistaken, as I often am when I try to interpret Mr. Kerry’s pearls of wisdom, he means that we would not engage in a war unless the world was on our side. Who then would we fight? And if, by some quirk of fate, we did find ourselves engaged in a hot war, a war in which we were defending ourselves, a war like the one we are fighting right now, would we surrender if the “world” told us to? Of all the nonsensical pronouncements of the Kerry campaign, this one has to be the most inane. This man would be ludicrous if he weren’t so dangerous

I think what’s even more interesting about his speech is this man’s sheer vanity. (He is very much like Bill Clinton in this regard.) Did you notice him mention the Viet Cong? Amazing. This man pretends to be JFK II. I don’t recall JFK bringing up PT-109 in every stump speech he gave on the campaign trail. Did George McGovern mention his tailgunner experience in WW2 at every speech? Did Richard Nixon mention the South Pacific?

A child once asked John Kennedy how he became a war hero. Kennedy replied, “They sank my boat.” That was class. (Yes, I know he wasn’t too classy in person, but bear with me.)

John Kerry filmed himself in Vietnam. He petitioned for his own medals! This man’s vanity is jaw-dropping.

Since Bill Clinton was the first “black” president, John Kerry will be the first “foreign” president. I’m amazed that more people aren’t discussing his absence from america as a young man in that boarding school in Switzerland. The fact that his wife is a conspicuous foreigner should give some insight into his fetish for diversity. Can’t help but wonder if this guy was flipped by the KGB as a teenager. He’s gone on to act out a diaphanous life, there’s no substance to this man - 89 days in vietnam then out, a segue into the antiwar movement without giving any moral or intellectual accounting for the shift. His prediliction for global institutions is the hallmark of every crypto-marxist. Truly the quintessential Manchurian candidate…

Or the Cambodian candidate.

Will take the opportunity to suggest a radically different response to a Kerry win: terrorism will abate for the duration of his presidency, you’d see the standard terror activities from the hezbollah playbook. More humiliting strikes, deferential responses etc. Nothing like keeping a disease festering, till you can overtake a weakened host. The message for America will be; elect Democrats and we’ll turn the murder dial to “nusiance”. Kerry betrays his slavish adherence to the rationalized insanity of managerial liberalism Jim Kalb often frets about (with good reason). Vietnam was the apotheosis of that ideology, to this day it persists in the highest levels of state craft. Can you imagine explaining the doctrine to Alexander, Themistocles, Lincoln, Eisenhower, they’d be on the floor laughing.

Kerry typifies the totalitarian arrogance of liberalism, that its future is so clearly inevitable no thought of defeat is brokered, its substance is unassailable, any dissent merits procedural accosting before it can enter the debate.

The liberal project has always been about finding political virtue in formal procedures and keeping substantive questions off the table. Kerry’s concept of the war done the right way is consistent with the liberal abolition of politics. Bush’s concept of the war on terror - that is, a war against certain procedures, a war that expressly does not engage with an enemy ideology - is also consistent with the liberal project of abolishing politics.

Modern politics is always a battle between different liberal factions, different conceptions of how to bring about the abolition of politics, the end of history. Every conception of liberalism, in order to act at all, has to ground its justification for action - its hidden concept of good and evil - in substantively empty propositions and procedures.