Liberal sniping

This is exactly the kind of crap I hate. Liberal journalists buying the mainstream media conventional wisdom and using it to attack Kerry. Today, Tim Grieve, writing in Salon, thinks Kerry should use the opportunity of grisly pictures from Iraq to unleash a new round of criticism of the President.

Iraq is exploding in Bush's lap, but Kerry seems to be the one running scared. Although Kerry has made sporadic comments about Iraq throughout the week -- in a radio interview Wednesday, he called the war "one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time that I've been in public life," and on Thursday he repeated his attack on Bush's unilateralist approach to the war -- he has not made the war a centerpiece of his campaign. As a young naval officer just back from Vietnam, John Kerry had the courage to help lead the nation out of one misguided military adventure; as a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, why is Kerry so cautious, so careful, so tentative now?

In Vietnam there were thousands of troops being killed every year and hundreds a month. The war had been dragging on for years and there was a full fledged debate going on in this country about whether we ought to just pull out completely and abandon our hopes of 'Vietnamization'. This was the debate Kerry entered as head of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War when he testified in front of Congress in 1971. The difference is now, no responsible President would simply pull out of Iraq, removing our troops and destroying a months long effort to build a democracy. If Iraq fails, it could likely drag down the whole region into spiraling violence and civil war. The next President, Bush or Kerry is going to have to stick it out in Iraq. So what would Kerry do? Grieve says Kerry won't say:

When asked Wednesday what he would be doing differently in Iraq, the challenger produced a stumbling non-sequitur of a response more typical of his opponent. "Right now," Kerry said, "what I would do differently is, I mean, look, I'm not the president, and I didn't create this mess, so I don't want to acknowledge a mistake I haven't made."

Funny, because if Mr. Grieve had the very next sentence of this Inside Politics interview, he would have seen this:

They need to go to the world and say we're not going to have an American authority that is -- creating this new government. We're going to have an international authority that will help develop the new government and absent a legitimate effort to globalize this presence, they're going to continue to have the very problems they have today.

This was predictable, and there are many of us who have said that this is exactly the kind of thing that will happen absent a legitimate kind of international presence.

I suppose one can't expect a lone Salon.com journalist to engage in anything like real journalism. It's always easier to follow the conventional wisdom and the GOP talking points.

As to the question of whether Kerry ought to throw out some more zingers at Bush to capitalize on the anger Americans feel at their President all I can say is Mr. Greive must have missed this:

And here today, once again, we are asking the question, 'Why is the United States of America almost alone in carrying this burden and the risks which the world has a stake in? I notice President Bush is taking some days off down at Crawford, Texas, and I'm told that when he takes days off, you know, he totally relaxes. He doesn't watch television, he doesn't read the newspapers, he doesn't make long-term plans, doesn't worry about the economy. I thought about that for a moment. I said, 'Sounds to me like it's just like life in Washington, doesn't it?