The Man who Should be President speaks

John Kerry delivered a real barnburner of a speech yesterday at Georgetown, in which he proposed a reasonable path forward in Iraq, and called for the withdrawal of 20,000 troops by Christmas, right after the Iraqi elections in December. Please do read it. Here's my personal favorite part, though the whole speech was brilliant.

The country and the Congress were misled into war. I regret that we were not given the truth; as I said more than a year ago, knowing what we know now, I would not have gone to war in Iraq. And knowing now the full measure of the Bush Administration’s duplicity and incompetence, I doubt there are many members of Congress who would give them the authority they abused so badly. I know I would not. The truth is, if the Bush Administration had come to the United States Senate and acknowledged there was no “slam dunk case” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, acknowledged that Iraq was not connected to 9/11, there never would have even been a vote to authorize the use of force — just as there’s no vote today to invade North Korea, Iran, Cuba, or a host of regimes we rightfully despise.

I understand that as much as we might wish it, we can’t rewind the tape of history. There is, as Robert Kennedy once said, ‘enough blame to go around,’ and I accept my share of the responsibility. But the mistakes of the past, no matter who made them, are no justification for marching ahead into a future of miscalculations and misjudgments and the loss of American lives with no end in sight. We each have a responsibility, to our country and our conscience, to be honest about where we should go from here. It is time for those of us who believe in a better course to say so plainly and unequivocally.

He also appeared last night on Hannity & Colmes, of all places, and where he delivered this remarkable paragraph:

COLMES: On my radio show at night, people will sometimes -- conservatives will call and say, "You know what, I'm really sorry I cast my vote for President Bush. And we play Brenda Lee and "I'm Sorry" and ask them to sing along.

COLMES: Do you find sometimes the people you meet express to you buyer's remorse?

KERRY: Yes, sure people come up to me. But look, again, I don't want to go backward; I want to go forward. We've got some big issues. We've got a country that desperately needs to be energy independent. There's so much we could do to create new jobs in America, to put people to work, to reduce the cost of gasoline for people. We're not doing it.

There's so much we could be doing to bring other countries to the table to help us in this effort. There's so much we could be doing to still fix our schools, to create new jobs. And yet the big fight in Washington is whether or not people earning more than a million dollars a year are going to get $32 billion worth of tax cuts next year.

When people talk about morality and values, we ought to apply a little morality and values to the fundamental choice that what goes into our budget and who is represented by it.

See how he did that? Imagine the current pResident delivering cogent ideas on energy, morality, tax cuts for the rich, and the difficulties facing the middle class in such a few words, and - hold on - actually meaning them.

The speech got some press and was also shown last night on c-span. Hopefully they'll have a link to stream it up soon.

Commenter Mass brought us the link to Kerry's new Iraq petition.