Kerry Haters: We're Not Fonda John

 
Okay, They'll Pretend to be Trying to Stop You, You Pretend to Throw the Ball



Action!

 
The Other Side of Every Photo

 
Who You Gonna Believe, My "F" Rating from the NRA or Your Lyin' Eyes?

 
Kerry to announce VP pick in mass e-mail and Mike thinks he knows what they'll find in their e-mailboxes!



For a larger view.

 
Be Back This Evening

Going out for a spin on a friend's boat (no, not the Scaramouche), will be out until the evening. In the meantime, Kitty's got a bunch of bloggy goodness for you.

 
That Part over There Reminds Me of Vietnam

 
Scheduling Conflict

Sounds like Kerry's got a decision to make.

The Bay State senator has proposed a concert on the Esplanade for Wednesday, July 28, featuring the Pops led by John Williams, singer James Taylor and a fireworks display.

But two of his wealthy supporters, chief fund-raiser Bob Crowe and Howard Kessler, are throwing the event from 6 to 9 that same evening at the pricey Mistral restaurant in Boston in honor of Teresa Heinz Kerry.

While the hoi polloi stretch out on blankets with their picnic baskets at the Pops concert, top Kerry donors will sip chardonnay at the trendy South End joint, surrounded by hand-picked French pottery, high ceilings and arched floor-to-ceiling windows.

Let's see, hang out with ordinary people, or hang out with rich donors and sip chardonnay. Which do you think Kerry will do?

 
SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU GO Hmmmmm



Senator Kerry is claiming that he has a plan to create 10 million new jobs. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are only 8.2 million people unemployed. Am I missing something here? Is this new math?

 
Say What?

Here's Botox Boy doing his John Cougar Mellencamp imitation:

"Don’t tell us that losing 13,000 dairy farms in Minnesota is the best that we can do," Kerry said. "We have the best family farms in America, but we’re denying those family farms the chance to be the best."

Either they're the best, John-boy, or we're denying them the chance to be the best. You can't have it both ways.

 
NY Times Laughable Defense of Kerry on Perfect Ad by Bush Campaign

They look at the ad the RNC came up with in response to Kerry's ridiculous campaign claim to have authored a book on the war on terrorism.

ACCURACY: Mr. Kerry's book did not delve into Al Qaeda or Mr. bin Laden, and indeed did focus primarily on global crime. Still, to say that Mr. Kerry does not "know the enemy" is a stretch. As a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Mr. Kerry was well aware of the threat posed by Mr. bin Laden, and the Kerry campaign provided a quotation from Mr. Kerry in 1998, after the embassy bombings in Africa, in which he called for swift justice for the Qaeda leader. An article in The New Republic did criticize the book for focusing too much on crime and not enough on terrorism. Still, one passage in Mr. Kerry's book does seem particularly prescient now, even if others had made similar predictions at around the same time: "The terrorists of tomorrow will be better armed and organized. It will take only one megaterrorist event in any of the great cities of the world to change the world in a single day."

Yes, and it is obvious what Mr Kerry intends in the event of another 9/11--to have lots of firefighters ready. This is so ridiculous--focusing on two sentences out of an entire book that had little or nothing to do with terrorism.

 
I Hate To Admit It



But most of my rock heroes probably have liver spots like that. Play "Truckin'" John!

 
Surfin' With the Alien



What can I say? He's John F'ing Kerry, rock star!

 
Email from Live Shot to Announce VP--Mini Contest!

I mean, is that pathetic or what?

Suppose you had to come up with the email to announce Kerry's pick. Come up with a humourous email for one of the alleged suspects (or somebody else), put it up on your blog, and mention it in the comments with a link (hint--links in the comments section work the same as in your blog--in fact when posting a link in the comments section of somebody else's blog I usually compose it in the editor for my own, then cut and paste). Bonus points definitely given for funny pictures and/or humor in general.

 
Get Ready for the Kerry Avalanche of Ads

Let's put a couple stories together here. First of all, Nuancy Boy is raising boatloads of cash. Second, he can't spend that cash during after the convention, when he gets $75 million from the Feds; as you remember, this became a big issue earlier when Kerry was making noises about not accepting the nomination until later.

Obvious conclusion: Kerry is going to swamp the battleground states with ads. Interestingly, I saw an article earlier today (can't find the link right now) that says Kerry's pulling advertising from Louisiana and Arkansas, states where he had hoped to be comptetitive.

 
Klaatu Barada Nicto!



The Kerry Thing emerges from the spacecraft to greet the humans.

 
Another Member for the Legion

This site is a really funny parody of Kerry's website.

 
Country Kerry

This is pretty funny. The NY Times assesses the Bush and Kerry campaigns' efforts to woo rural voters. Get this:

It will be a battle of heartland imagery as Mr. Kerry tries to show a different side from the urban, liberal Northeasterner so often caricatured by his Republican opponents — to show rural voters that "he looks like them, talks like them, and cares about them," as John Norris, his national field director (who hails from Iowa), puts it.

LOL! "Looks like them, talks like them"? He looks and talks like Thurston Howell III, and it's hard to convince me that someone who earned the name DYKWIA (Do You Know Who I Am) "cares" about them. Remember Dave Barry's experience with Le Fraude?

[Consider] Sen. John Kerry, who once came, with his entourage, into a ski-rental shop in Ketchum, Idaho, where I was waiting patiently with my family to rent snowboards, and Sen. Kerry used one of his lackeys to flagrantly barge in line ahead of us and everybody else, as if he had some urgent senatorial need for a snowboard, like there was about to be an emergency meeting, out on the slopes, of the Joint Halfpipe Committee. I say it's time for us, as a nation, to put this unpleasant incident behind us. I know that I, for one, have forgotten all about it. That is how fair and balanced I am.

 
Krugman on Michael Moore

It's kind of like the anti-Reese's peanut butter cup; Krugman and Moore are my two least favorite things put together.

Krugman wants you to know:

Since it opened, "Fahrenheit 9/11" has been a hit in both blue and red America, even at theaters close to military bases. Last Saturday, Dale Earnhardt Jr. took his Nascar crew to see it. The film's appeal to working-class Americans, who are the true victims of George Bush's policies, should give pause to its critics, especially the nervous liberals rushing to disassociate themselves from Michael Moore.

There have been a few nervous liberals like Richard Cohen disassociating themselves from the chubby one, but most of the ones in congress seem to be bonding. One expects them all to be wearing Michigan State hats and sporting scruffy beards (even the women).

As for the notion that Fatundhate 9/11 has been a big hit, consider that about three million people saw it last weekend. This weekend about ten times that number will see Spiderman 2. And the three million are all the kook lefties who already hated Bush and were dying to vote against him.

It's amazing to me that the NY Times employs hacks such as Krugman and Dowd. A relative who came out for a visit yesterday had the Times with him, and it seems that Tom Friedman is on a sabbatical to write a book. The Times replaced him for that period with the odious Barbara Ehrenreich from The Nation. The Times drifts further out of the mainstream....

 
Kerry's Concert

Kerry wants to "give" a concert to the people of Boston during his convention. Who do you think will be playing? The Boston Pops, for one thing. But it wouldn't be a John Kerry event without a nod to the early 1970s, so he's wheeling out James Taylor. Not knocking Sweet Baby James, just pointing out that when you look for Kerry's time warp you see it everywhere. We used to laugh about Unfrozen Caveman Gore, Kerry's the Unfrozen Hippie. Incidentally, the article makes it clear that not all of Boston is thrilled at the concept of another crowd descending on the Hub City during the convention, which is already disrupting normal business.

 
Kerry: Stop Bringing It On!



We'll stop on November 3rd.

 
Sigh, More on the Veepstakes

I'm sick of talking about this, but if you want more, here's the NY Times' ridiculous take and here's one from the Boston Globe. Jim Geraghty has a good analysis of the three main contenders (Edwards, Gephardt and Vilsack). Did you know that Gephardt was satirized in Bloom County? Jim also makes an excellent point. Vilsack has no obvious external constituency pushing him. Edwards is apparently popular inside the party according to polls, and Gephardt is getting backing from the unions. So why is Vilsack on the short list? The obvious answer is that the Kerry campaign (and probably Kerry himself) likes him. Remember, Kerry made his comeback in Iowa with the help of Vilsack's wife; without Iowa we'd probably be talking about presumptive Democratic nominee Dean. Plus Vilsack has the advantage of being the unknown to most of America, hence there will be a little boomlet of interest that won't happen with the Breck Girl or Gephardt.

 
Kerry Pandering for Latino Vote

Robert Robb (the only good columnist at the Arizona Republic) has the story.

Kerry said that in his first 100 days, he would submit an immigration reform bill to Congress that would give legal residency and a pathway to citizenship to illegal immigrants.

This was intended to contrast with the immigration reform proposal announced in January by President Bush, which would also regularize the status of illegal immigrants but not provide a pathway to citizenship. In fact, they would ultimately have to return to their country of origin, primarily Mexico.

This should get the folks who call into the talk shows complaining about immigration back on President Bush's side (although I won't hold my breath).

 
Legion Roundup

Bush over Kerry has a post about Bush's green thumb for jobs, and highlights how the media are scrounging desperately for sad stories to offset the good economic news.

Bassfire has some food for Mikey and gives a little history lesson to the Democrats in the Senate.

Sportsmen for Kerry? looks at Kerry's record on hunting and fishing issues. Don't be fooled by the photo ops, Kerry's a gun-grabber in the tradition of Diane Feinstein.

Jim Geraghty over at the Kerry Spot points us to this great, but worried article by Peggy Noonan in today's WSJ.

Here is my fear: that the American people, liking and respecting President Bush, and knowing he's a straight shooter with guts, will still feel a great temptation to turn to the boring and disingenuous John Kerry. He'll never do anything exciting. He doesn't have the guts to be exciting. And as he doesn't stand for anything, he won't have to take hard stands. He'll do things like go to France and talk French and they'll love it. He'll say he's the man who accompanied Teresa Heinz to Paris, only this time he'll say it in French and perfectly accented and they'll all go "ooh la la!"

Geraghty has really hit his stride, with lots of content-filled posts.

 
Yet Another Member for the Legion!

Just found it on my referring pages; My Take on Things. He's got lots of video, audio, and funny pics. Nice site!

 
Oh, That Liberal Media

Michelle Malkin's been blogging for a few weeks now, and is rapidly moving to the top of the blogosphere. She highlights a piece today written by a former Marine in Iraq, about how the WaPo (and other media outlets) have been covering Iraq from their hotel rooms.

Chandrasekaran's crew generates a relentlessly negative stream of articles from Iraq – and if there are no events to report, they resort to man-on-the-street interviews and cobble together a story from that. Last week, there was a front-page, above-the-fold article about Iraqis jeering U.S. troops, which amounted to a pastiche of quotations from hostile Iraqis. It was hardly unique. Given the expense of maintaining an Iraq bureau with a dozen staffers, they have to write something to justify themselves, even if the product is shoddy.

 
Protest Warrior Strikes!

This is pretty good.

Hat Tip: InDC Journal

 
OUCH!



Roberto has posted an article on Dynamo Buzz saying that New Jersey now taxes cosmetic surgery, which includes Botox injections. At 6%, trying to smooth out your wrinkles could put a crimp in your finances. Too bad the Botoxicated Brahmin and Mother Kerry don’t live in Joi-zee

 
Coulter at Her Best

She's in rare form today.

The Americanization of Iraq proceeds at an astonishing pace, the Iraqis are taking to freedom like fish to water, and the possibilities for this nation are endless. It's hard to say who's more upset about these developments: the last vestiges of pro-Hussein Baathist resistance in Iraq or John Kerry's campaign manager.

The New York Times ran a front-page news story on Sunday about how life was better for Iraqi girls under Saddam Hussein -- living under Saddam, that is, not the girls who were literally under Saddam, Odai and Qusai while they were being raped. The article was titled "For Iraqi Girls, Changing Land Narrows Lives." True, they don't have to run from Odai's rape rooms anymore. But apparently not a single Iraqi female has been admitted to Augusta National Golf Club since the liberation!

To paraphrase Orwell, there are some things so ridiculous that only a liberal could believe them. Not that that's going to stop the Times from printing such bilge.

 
Kerry on Defense

Aaron Matthew Arnwine is getting a lot of links out of us these days, because he comes up with good ideas for posts, and then follows through with the necessary work to organize and present them well.

Today he assembled an excellent post comparing Bush and Kerry on three major military-related issues: Allies, Missile Defense, and Modernization, based on an interview Kerry gave Defense News. He also critiques Kerry's positions.

 
New Microbe

Got a comment from Dave on one of the posts today and surfed on over to his brand new blog, Cheese and Bacon (mmmmbacon). Looks like he's got the blogging basics down (as Jim Rome would say, have a take and don't suck), but unfortunately it doesn't look like the comments are working (or the permalinks). So far he's got a couple posts about everybody's favorite pinata, Michael Moore, and one about capital punishment in Iraq.

Welcome to blogging, Dave! Get yourself a sitemeter so you can see how many folks we're sending your way! :)

 
But Here's Good News for Nuancy Boy

Howard Kurtz has the coverage.

Deep in a story about the latest New York Times/CBS poll showing a dead heat between Kerry and Bush was this eye-catching number: 36 percent of those surveyed had no opinion of the senator from Massachusetts.

Despite the zillions of dollars the Democratic candidate has spent on advertising, he remains a fuzzy image for millions of Americans.



Kerry's desire is to remain the generic candidate, so much so that I expect him to start wearing a white suit with a barcode on the sleeve. This shows that he's succeeded so far. It only stays good news if he can continue to remain invisible for the next four months, because the minute those 36% form an opinion, he's doomed.

 
Shock Jock Stern to Support Kerry

USA Today has the story.



This is actually good news for President Bush. I know Stern has a lot of listeners (most of whom are in high school). But he's a jerk who will turn off more people than he helps Kerry with.

 
Kitty Corner

Kitty has some great posts up today. She points to the great Crush Kerry article we highlighted a bit earlier, along with this post from econopundit.

The major mathematical models are predicting not simply Bush victory, but Republican landslide. The Ray Fair presidential vote equation as well as the economy.com state-by-state point in the same direction: Kerry, basically, has no chance. Here's a graphical summary of the economy.com prediction:

She also finds an article revealing that a Canadian bettor has placed $110,000 on President Bush to win.

 
Kerry's So Energy Efficient, He Even Recycles Old Strategies

The New York Times' Jodi Wilgoren has part of the story. A new ad for the Boston Fog Machine claims in a voiceover that Kerry has been:

Nineteen years Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Author of a strategy to win the war on terror.

Here's Wilgoren's fisking of that last claim:

In terms of his "strategy to win the war on terror," the commercial showcases Mr. Kerry's 1997 book, "The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens America's Security." The book predates what we now think of as the war on terror; much of the seven-point plan his campaign cites as backup for the advertisement's claim was devised after the book's publication. The book does not mention Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda, and The New Republic wrote recently that it "was almost entirely focused on the threat of global crime, not terrorism" and viewed "post-cold war security more as a matter for law enforcement than the military."

Well, that's the strategy, anyway, even if it is recycled from his book on international crime.

 
Crush Kerry on What's at Stake--Updated!

We yield to nobody on our admiration for the good folks over at Crush Kerry. They've got a great website with solid content, excellent writing, a lively forum and a puckish sense of humor.

But we did not know that they were capable of something like this.

So who will they be, our new leaders? Who will comprise this new Kerry coalition that would have us lay down our arms against invaders, apologize for our malfeasance and dig deeper, work harder for an omnipresent nanny state? Well, some of them are on our television screens nightly, is seems. Michael Moore, of course, will receive tremendous credit for energizing Kerry’s electoral base. And George Soros has given them all the resources they will need. It ought to matter that the one openly predicts our defeat in the War on Terror and the other openly compares our president to Adolph Hitler. But it doesn’t.

They are also people like Hillary Clinton, who in a moment of candor stated recently, “We’re going to take from you for the benefit of the common good.”

Start calling these people your masters.

Or don’t. Un-wring your hands. Gird your back for the heavy lifting ahead. Bend your knees a little, the blows will come hard. But raise your head in defiance and scream “enough!” Recognize that adversity introduces a man to himself. Then shake his hand.

That is simply magnificent. If you read nothing else today, read this whole piece. Then email it to everybody you know.

Update: Congrats to Crush Kerry on reaching the 500,000-visitor mark, with 175,000 visitors this month! =^) No wonder our site meter starts twirling like a dervish when they link to us!

 
Message Deficit Disorder

Donald Lambro says Kerry's suffering from it.

Go over the lengthy list of Mr. Kerry's campaign attacks on the president's handling of Iraq and his relations with world leaders and Mr. Bush seems to have defused, undercut or co-opted virtually all of them.

But if Mr. Kerry is losing the essential debating points on Iraq, what is left of his larger campaign message? That is, if he still has a compelling message, which many analysts now doubt.

Pollsters in both parties tell me Mr. Kerry's chief problem is his message, which is too unfocused to appeal to the independent swing voters he will need to beat Mr. Bush.

Heh. Kerry's chief problem is that he's an aloof, arrogant stiff. The message thing is just a reflection of that.

 
THIS IS THE REAL DEAL




Not that fraud, Kerry. If you want to feel as though you’re helping fight the war on terror, helping to bring stability and human dignity to a region where none existed for years, then help our soldiers who are truly fighting the good fight. Donate to Operation Gratitude.

Thanks, Lucianne!

 
OKAY, NOW WHAT?


Delegate Neill Goltz, of Grinnell, Iowa, holds Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers at the Iowa state Democratic convention, Saturday June 26, 2004, in Des Moines, Iowa. Sen. John Edwards (news - web sites), D-N.C., is on the short list of vice presidential hopefuls for the John Kerry (news - web sites) ticket and has stumped across the country for the Massachusetts senator. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Read those signs in the photo and notice that not everyone on the left is going gaga over Her Royal C.

DESPERATE MEASURES
Could it be that desperation is setting in a bit more, well, desperately in the Kerry campaign?
…
"It's accelerated. It all began happening on Wednesday," says the campaign source. "For the past week we've been told there was no decision, then all of sudden, this. We've been sifting through some cruddy poll numbers, so maybe that has something to do with it."
Cruddy indeed. New polling from a number of sources, including internal polling, has Kerry struggling and even lagging in a race that by all rights he should be leading by low double digits.

 
OPERATION GRATITUDE



BURNING A BUDDY
So Kerry baldly stood up [Boston Mayor] Menino and the nation's mayors — just to support one side in a garden-variety negotiation process. This is not the stuff of Cesar Chavez.
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick — a Democrat — didn't mince words. He told the Boston Globe after the conference: "I'm leaning towards being angry. It's not a leadership move."
Here's what Kilpatrick didn't say: Kerry betrayed a supporter and a constituent for a sound bite.
…
In Kerry's one heated test of the campaign, he's bared one tenet of personal character and one tenet of national Democratic politics: Loyalty to a friend is expendable — but support for labor is non-negotiable.

 
Kerry's Latest Flip-Flop on Cuba

Today, John Kerry had an oped published in the Miami Herald and on his website. Get this bit:

Where democracy is in peril, support the forces of peaceful democratic opposition. Those in Venezuela who seek to strengthen democracy through the constitutional process of a referendum deserve our full support. In Cuba, we must support Oswaldo Payá and his brave colleagues on the Varela Project. I have honored principled dissent, civil disobedience and peaceful challenges to authority my entire adult life. Indeed, without dissent we could not have made progress toward civil rights in America, ended the war in Vietnam or defeated apartheid and communism abroad.

Now that's a flip-flop, because listen to what else the International Man of Mystery has said about the Varela project according to David Brooks:

Sometimes in the unscripted moments of an election campaign, when the handlers are away, a candidate shows his true nature. Earlier this month, Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald asked John Kerry what he thought of something called the Varela Project. Kerry said it was "counterproductive." It's necessary to try other approaches, he added.



Hat Tip: Aaron Mathew Arnwine (in the comments)

 
Is Your Dog Conservative, or a Wiener Dog?

Mike Gallaugher has a test to determine the answer.

 
New Legion Member!

I probably should have seen this one before, but welcome Bush over Kerry!

Great blog, lotsa links, intelligently written.

 
Site Update

Decided to spend a few minutes making the site a little more visually interesting. Let me know any problems with the way it came out in the comments. I may do a little fiddling with the colors as well--although the pea green has served us well, I've never liked the orange letters on the green background at the top. There's gotta be a better color.

 
Kerry & the Unions

Scott Lehigh says the Pandescenderer missed an opportunity for a Sister Souljah moment when he refused to cross the picket lines.

Accustomed to the similar tactics from their own unions, the mayors had sharp words for Kerry's decision.

"We're very disappointed and angry that Senator Kerry didn't come," said Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer, president of the National Conference of Democratic Mayors. "We believe it was a missed opportunity on his part."

Indeed it was. "It could have been a similar situation to Bill Clinton . . . and the Sister Souljah issue," said Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. The June 1992 moment when Clinton used an appearance before the Rainbow Coalition to rebuke the rap singer for her irresponsible comments has become a political metaphor for speaking necessary truths to the party faithful.

Menino, who's a Democrat, is apparently not on the greatest of terms with Le Fraude according to the Boston Herald.



Mayor Thomas M. Menino unloaded a searing attack on fellow Democrat John F. Kerry [related, bio] yesterday, calling his presidential campaign ``small-minded'' and ``incompetent'' - laying bare a years-old rift weeks before the city plays host to Kerry's FleetCenter coronation.

Menino, in an exclusive Herald interview, let loose on the hometown senator two days after Kerry snubbed him by siding with union picketers outside a U.S. Conference of Mayors event.

``Maybe they should use some of their energies to get their message across to the American people instead of trying to destroy the integrity of someone who is on their team, to try to discredit someone on their team,'' Menino said. ``They have better things to do.''

Hat Tip: Captain's Quarters, who has more.

 
Traffic Patterns

This is probably not of any interest to the non-bloggers. I enter the data from my weekly site meter reports into a spreadsheet when I receive them. I'm a quantitative analyis-type guy, so I thought I'd take a look at a couple months worth of data to see what it will tell me.

First of all, traffic from Monday through Thursday appears to be fairly even, with Monday appearing to be by a small margin the heaviest day. Traffic on Friday is lower than the rest of the weekdays; I assume that the falloff is in the evening of that day. Saturdays and Sundays are slow compared to the rest of the week, with about a 40% dropoff in readers.

Second, traffic varies widely during the day We get very little traffic in the early morning hours. By 8:00 AM my time (11:00 East Coast), 1/3rd of the day is gone, but only 1/7th of the visitors have arrived. The busiest time of day appears to be noon to 6:00 PM, with almost 40% of our visitors stopping by between those hours. By noon, only 1/3rd of our total visitors have arrived; the halfway point appears sometime around 2:30 PM.

 
Kerry Down 12 in Arizona

That's the conclusion of a new ASU poll. I've said for a long time that the Democrats were wasting their time and energy here in the Grand Canyon State. Keep it up!

 
What Do Michael Jackson and John Kerry Have In Common?



They both wear a glove on one hand for no apparent reason.

 
Who Are the Professors at the Electoral College?

John Hawkins at Right Wing News takes a look at the electoral college vote based on the states won in 2000 as modified by recent polling data. His conclusion?

Don't get overconfident, but like I've been saying all along, Bush, not Kerry, is in the catbird's seat.

 
Kerry Iraqs His Brain, Comes Up With No Solutions

Crush Kerry has a strong post on The International Man of Apology's carping on the Iraq situation without proposing any realistic solutions. Apparently he feels that apologies alone will bring the French and the Germans around.

This post has a fair amount of bite to it:

With regard to our old “friends” the French and their lap dogs the Germans (how's that for historic role reversal), let us ignore, like John Kerry has, the "Oil For Food Scandal" and instead focus on their overt actions. Ever since the lead up to the Iraq war, these nations (and others) have been nothing more than large pimples on the a$$ of progress. Just this week at the NATO summit on Iraq they refused to allow a NATO mission in a newly freed Iraq, refused, despite a request from Hamid Karzai, to deploy a new NATO strike force to ensure security during Afghan election, and chided President Bush over his isolation of terrorist Yasser Arafat.

 
My Answer to the Question for the Readers

Down below I asked my readers to assume that Kerry drops out in favor of an (unknown) candidate. Would they be happy or sad? Relieved or worried? Whom do they think the person would be?

Happy or sad? I'd like to be mostly happy, even though it would KILL THIS BLOG before its appointed date of November 3rd, 2004. Kerry is a disaster and anything that gets him off the ticket is a positive for the country. He's not likely to win, but stranger things have happened.

Relieved or worried? Gotta admit, I'd be just a little worried. As Kitty said in the comments, I'm supporting Bush all the way. I think that almost anybody the Democrats put in there is more likely to win (assuming it isn't somebody completely ridiculous like Kucinich or Sharpton).

Who would be the person? This is a tricky one. As I've said, many times, I don't expect Kerry to drop out. But suppose something happens and Kerry does have to drop out--a medical issue, for example. There are really only three serious contenders: Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and John Edwards. Hillary and Al because they could step right into a national campaign and hit the ground running. The Breck girl because after all, he was the last person left standing next to Kerry during the primary season, and because he would appear to have the best chance. My guess is that Hillary would decline unless she's really convinced she could win. Gore would take any chance he could get, but I doubt the Democrats would want to go that route again. So if Kerry drops out, my money's on Edwards to be the substitute nominee.

 
Is it Hill?

Drudge is reporting that Hillary is going to be the veep nominee.



I don't know. Drudge's sources haven't been the best when it comes to Nuancy Boy--remember Alex Polier? And there is this hilarious quote from an insider:

"All the signs point in her direction," said the insider, one of the most influential and well-placed in the nation's capital. "It is the solution to every Kerry problem."

It might energize the Democrats' base; the question is whether it would energize the Republicans' even more.

 
Kerry and the Teachers--Yet Another Flip Flop

Anybody think Kerry will be talking like this at the NEA convention this weekend?

We must end teacher tenure as we now know it," said Kerry in 1998 speeches delivered in Boston and Washington. During those speeches, Kerry took shots at a public education bureaucracy that shielded public schools and teachers from accountability and bemoaned that "those going into teaching have the lowest SAT and ACT scores of any profession in the United States."

In a 1998 New Republic article, Dana Milbank wrote that Kerry told her he'd "even approve government-funded vouchers - good for tuition at any accredited private school - as part of an overall education reform. ..." At the time, Kerry was proposing turning all public schools into charter schools. The reasoning was that, since students are assigned to public schools, the system has no incentive to improve and no accountability for failure. Stated otherwise, the public school system is a monopoly. But if poor families could send their children to any charter school, with the government paying all or part of the tuition, public schools would be forced to raise their standards or risk having their students flee.

"I'm for tough love here, folks," Kerry said. "It's time to come in and kick some butts. Democrats can't be viewed as somehow protecting these practices. You can't do this in some loosey-goosey ... way."

 
Kerry Not Making Most of Photo Ops

That's Richard Wolfe's assessment.

You’d have to be a dedicated reader of small campaign news stories to know that Kerry pitched his science policies last week. Especially because there were no pictures of him visiting a laboratory, or touring a microchip plant. For some mysterious reason, Kerry kicked off his high-tech week at a mock-classical Greek theater in downtown Denver, Colorado. Kerry has enough problems looking animated without this kind of dismal, and often meaningless, backdrop.

Well, Kerry did get dubbed the International Man of Science last week around here. We read small campaign stories, but aside from Kerry's idiotic quote that he believes in science, Wolfe makes a good point. I also comb the images of Kerry and I didn't see any backdrop that looked remotely related to the topic of science.

 
Question for the Readers

Suppose Kerry were to withdraw from the race in favor of an (as yet) unknown Democrat. Would you be happy or sad? Relieved or worried? Whom do you think the person would be? My take will be posted later in the day.

 
Why Isn't Anybody Excited About This Guy?

 
More Google Search Fun

I just love reading the Site Meter referral pages to see what google/yahoo searchs brought people to Kerry Haters. Here are a few from yesterday evening:

John Kerry Waffles: #8 result on Yahoo.

Michael Moore Haters: #4 result on Google.

Kerry Communist Hat: #5 on Google.

Botoxicated Brahmin: #3 on Google

John Kerry Haters: We're #1 on Google.

John Kerry idiotic quotes: #4 on Google

John Kerry Forty Kills: #7 (I believe the reference is to how many enemy Kerry killed in Vietnam). Roger L. Simon is #6.

Secret Service Kerry Beacon Hill: Approximately 130th on Google (somebody was really digging deep on that one!).

Photos Laura Roxx: #11 on MSN. Never hurts to mention famous porn stars on your blog. John Holmes, Annette Haven, Ginger Lynn. Hmmmm, not up on the hot new names.

John Kerry Cartoons: #14 on Yahoo.

John Kerry Jokes: #21 on Yahoo

Kerry Nicknames: #3 on Google

 
Kerry Held Hostage

Thomas Lifson takes on Kerry's deference to the Boston Police Union, in refusing to cross their picket line.

So labor leaders all across America now understand that they face a prospective president who is a willing hostage to picket lines. Kerry has not just extended a helping hand to the labor barons, he has allowed them to take custody of another portion of his anatomy. He will sell out a natural ally, the Democrat mayor of the town where he ostensibly resides, and where he expects to receive the nomination. Just because he was mildly threatened.

Interestingly, it looks like Live Shot ignored another picket line today to speak to Jesse Jackson's group, Operation Push for Bribes, errr, Operation Push.

 
LOVE CAN BE SO FICKLE



Do you think they'd be making these snarky comments if they were fairly certain he would win?

KERRY: MASK OR ZOMBIE?
WHAT a difference four years makes. When he was being considered as Al Gore's running mate back in 2000, John Kerry was lauded as "handsome" and "telegenic" by plenty of pundits. But many commentators don't find him so hunky anymore.

 
MOMMY WARBUCKS



The GI Gigolo was a relative pauper until he married Mother Teraaaaaza. Some are saying -- not I, you understand :) -- that he married her money and got the big mouth (who’s still talking about her other John, the dead one) as a bonus. But then McCain and Feingold had to muck things up. Hey, we tried to warn them! CFR: The gift that keeps on giving.

Kerry Has to Decide Soon on Repaying a Big Loan
A provision in the new campaign finance law requires Mr. Kerry to pay back the loan shortly after the Democratic convention next month if he plans to use campaign money.
…
The interest alone, which his campaign has been paying, is more than $16,600 a month, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks campaign spending.
…
Mr. Kerry makes $158,100 a year as a senator; he would earn $400,000 annually if elected president. He received $89,000 in royalties last year from Viking Penguin for his book timed to the campaign, "A Call to Service." Those proceeds go to charity.
On his financial disclosure form this year, he listed personal assets of $417,000 to $2.1 million in four trust accounts, as well as $250,000 to $500,000 in bank accounts held jointly with his wife.
…
"It's another aspect of how the new campaign finance law is having a bearing on the presidential election, and a fairly significant one," Mr. Toner said. "How candidates decide cash flow and how they repay themselves is being dictated by the statute."

 
Imagine Having This Celeb at Your Party for Kerry



It's Chris Heinz, son of Teh-RAY-za. Looks like there are about 6 people in the room (check out the tiny snack spread for confirmation). Even the stepson (who's going to get the money, not Kerry) can't seem to get people excited.

 
The Win At Any Cost Democrats

We talked the other day about the fact that the Democrats in Massachusetts have discovered the downside of a Kerry presidency. No, not the end of the war on terror, not the rescinding of the Bush tax cuts. Not even the silly stuff, like 1,000,000 more college students, or 100,000 more firefighters.

It's that the Democrats would lose Kerry's Senate seat. Under current law, Republican Governor Mitt Romney would name a replacement who would serve until 2006, until a special election could be held for the position, in 2006.

But of course this is intolerable from the standpoint of the Democrats. The rules are only rules when they result in a just result; in this case, when they result in a Democrat having the job.

The sad news is that they probably have the votes to override any veto by the governor.

 
Here Comes the Toricelli Option Again!

Democrat blogger Brendan Loy hits the panic button. (If you go, be friendly).

So, why "Dem Panic" specifically, instead of general national panic? Well, for one thing, the question must be asked, why are Kerry's numbers dropping? He's taken a big dive in the past month -- but why? Bush's negative ads have lessened of late, as the campaign sits on some of its money for the moment. Hell, we went through a period of non-campaigning just a couple weeks back, after Reagan died. And most of the news focus has been on Iraq. Overall, this has been essentially a politically dead month, except for all the Clinton crap. Could it be that "Clinton fatigue" is weighing Kerry down? Or is it just slowly sinking in with the public that, hey, this guy isn't very good? I suspect the latter -- and that doesn't bode well at all.

We also have to consider the 32% of the public that still doesn't know enough about John Kerry to have an opinion, favorable or unfavorable. How do you think those voters will feel if their big introduction to Kerry is the Democratic convention -- an event which, as mentioned earlier, seems certain to be dominated by the likes of Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy, and Al "Digital Brownshirt" Gore? And what will happen once these undecided voters, in the wake of the Boston fiasco, join the ranks of the unfavorables? Does anyone honestly believe Bush's ratings are going to fall further?



At the end he calls for a white knight to save the Democrats. Unfortunately, it's more of a red queen.

I don't see a chance of the Toricelli option at this point. Remember, Toricelli had bad news come out after the primaries. Kerry has not been polling well (nowhere near as bad as the Torch), but nobody can say that it's because of things Democrats did not know well before the campaign began. Kerry's unfriendly nature, his sonorous speaking style, and his tendency to pander to whomever he was talking, were all cliches.

 
Kerry Says One Thing to One Group...

Here's Kerry in the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual) issues section of his website:

Lifting the Ban on Gays in the Military
John Kerry opposed the Clinton Administration’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Policy” He was one of a few senators to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee and call on the President to rescind the ban on gay and lesbian service members.

Sounds pretty definitive, right? But when he's talking to a military publication, it's a little more, shall we say, nuanced?

Q: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” What do you do?

Kerry: Sit down with my lead commanders in the military and figure out whether there’s a way to put talented people to work without running into a confrontation with unit cohesion issues and other things that I respect and understand. But it seems to me that we’re losing a lot of talent for our nation in interpretation, in intelligence in a lot of different things. There must be a way for those people to serve somehow. I’d like to sit and talk with my commanders and see what thoughtful people could do to have the strongest military possible to provide for the security of our country.

You know what they say about Kerry: If you don't like his position today, don't worry, neither will he tomorrow.

Hat Tip: Viking Pundit for the Army Times interview.

 
Kerry Opposed Nuclear Evacuation Plans!

The Boston Herald did some digging into the Boston Fog Machine's past and came up with this bombshell:

John F. Kerry, trying to win his first statewide campaign in 1982, railed against nuclear preparedness plans and joined left-wing critics who called evacuating cities a waste of time, records show.

``This civil defense plan is nothing more than escalation disguised as saving lives, designed to show the American people's willingness to think and prepare for the unthinkable,'' Kerry wrote in a fund-raising letter that summer.

John Kerry: Not willing to think and prepare for the unthinkable.

 
Blogger Roundup

Kitty tells us that her hand is back to normal, but unfortunately that means no more dates, errr, appointments, with Dr. Gorgeous.

Mike Gallaugher over at Christian Conservative had a startling incident on the way home from a camping trip.

Michael King from Rambling's Journal has a nice photo sequence on Prime Minister Blair and President Bush's congratulatory handshake. In fact, it was so nice that I extended the sequence over at Brainster's with a couple more photos I was able to dig up.

Right-Thinking Girl, who got the signal (and well-deserved) honor of having her wonderful piece on Love in a Time of Danger posted to Right Wing News, connects some dots that the media apparently missed.

The Second to Last Resort says Kerry's campaign is a disaster.

What can he do?

Well he can stop the Democrats looking like wackos with all their 'we hate Bush' stuff, he can hide his wife because a steel worker in Ohio is unlikely to empathise with a billionaire by marriage, but I suspect one problem he can't overcome is himself. Whilst people may not like Bush they like Kerry less. The Tories in the UK ditched their version of Kerry, IDS, perhaps so should the Democrats (unless Kerry is the patsy to lose 2004 so Hillary can get 2008).

Aaron Matthew Arnwine provides John Kerry with Something to Cry About; a job growth estimate of 300,000. Fortunately, Aaron has provided the Againster with some talking points (pretty funny ones at that).

 
Kerry's Miserable Index Takes Another Beating

USA Today decided to take a look at the college tuition being paid at state universities and colleges. Their discovery?

Average tuition paid at public universities fell 32% from $1,636 in the 1997-98 academic year to $1,115 in 2002-03. During that time, the published tuition price rose 18% to an average of $4,202. About three-fourths of the nation's 12 million college students attend public institutions.

This pokes a major hole in Kerry's Miserable Index.

The four largest contributors to the declines in the Middle-class Misery Index from 2000 to 2003 – in order – were rising college tuition, falling private-sector jobs, rising health premiums, and declining family incomes.

In other words, the single largest contributor to the decline reported in Kerry's Miserable Index has actually improved quite a bit in the time frame that Kerry claims it has gotten worse.

Hat Tip to Right-Thinking Girl (in a comment on Kerry Haters).

 
Revolutionary Drug Brothers Handshake Returns

 
If John Kerry Had His Way, This Would Still Be Happening

Read this and tell me we should not have gone to Iraq, that we should have given more time for the sanctions to work, or assembled a "non-fraudulent" coalition. WARNING: This is not for the faint of heart, it's incredibly gruesome and disturbing. Michael Moore may believe that Iraq under Saddam was all about kids flying kites. We know better.

 
Kerry Continues to Ignore Minorities

The Washington Post has the story.

Although the Massachusetts senator has many black supporters, civil rights leaders and academics are grumbling about his absence from black communities and a lack of top black officials in his campaign.



Captain Ed provides the analysis.

Over 90% of the black vote went to Al Gore in 2000 ... and he lost anyway, and that in a race where evangelicals stayed home in droves, an unlikely event this time around. Unfortunately for African-Americans, 2000 proved one thing: Republicans can win without them and Democrats can lose even when they have almost complete support from them. Lockstep, or bloc, voting has made their constituency somewhat irrelevant at the national level, although that is certainly not true at state and local levels.

 
Kerry on the Iraqi Sovereignty

Leave it to Kerry Core to nail it with a faux response from Nuancy Boy.

Because of George W. Bush, 10 million Iraqis still don't have health insurance. 1 million Iraqi seniors still have to pay for their own prescription drugs. 500,000 Iraqi college students can't even afford to go to a decent university", Kerry said.

"If George Bush wants us to believe a sovereign Iraq is better off today than it was under Saddam Hussein, he must think we Democrats are the most idiotic buffoons on the planet", said Kerry.

Kerry Core always has great parodies of Pterodactyl.

 
More on AWOL Kerry

AWOL Kerry missed another important vote last week.

Only three senators voted against the pro-Israel resolution: ex-Klansman Robert Byrd of West Virginia, John Sununu of New Hampshire and independent James Jeffords of Vermont. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, skipped the ballot. So did only one other senator: John Kerry. He was in California.

 
Kerry: One Million More College Students

This is pretty funny. Kerry again makes a nutty promise, of one million more college students in five years. How's he going to do this?

Kerry's campaign says nearly half the hike in graduation rates will come from population increases, and he'll achieve the other half by bringing down the cost of education and creating other incentives to bring students to college and keep them there.

So half of his miracle is already in the demographics. But Kerry also wants to increase the minimum wage to $7.00, and it should be obvious that an increase like that would tend to increase the dropout rate.

 
Kerry Nickname Roundup--Updated

I dug through the archives for awhile to come up with this revised list. Any additions?

Le Fraude, International Man of Apology, The New-Wonk of Nuance, Lord of Louisburg Square, the Boston Fog Machine, Nuancy Boy, Botoxicated Brahmin, Lurch, Herman Munster, International Man of Mystery, the Pandescenderer, Flipper, Mr Ed, Ol' Horseface, Flapjack, John Facade Kerry, John F'ing Kerry, John F Skerry (Scarey), Live Shot, The Againster, DYKWIA, Botox Boy and Ol' Sourpuss, Hanoi John, Hanoi Boi, Pterodactyl, Man from Mope, A Dressed-Up Abbie Hoffman, International Man of Science... 29 and counting!

Update: Victoria Payne suggested Botoxed Brahmin, which is too similar to an exisiting nickname, but she does have a good one: Scary Kerry Quite Contrary. Thirty!

 
Cheney Chews Up Kerry, Spits Him Out

Bill Sammon, showing why he's the best pure newsman in DC:

"Saddam Hussein once controlled the lives and the future of almost 25 million people," Mr. Cheney told the party faithful in Hebron, Ky. "Today, he's in jail."

In case anyone missed the point, he added: "These are not times for leaders who shift with the political winds, saying one thing one day, and another the next."

Mr. Kerry sounded unimpressed with yesterday's developments.

"I believe it is critical that the president get real support — not resolutions, not words — but real support of sufficient personnel, troops and money to assist in the training of security forces," he told reporters in Baltimore.

But, as is not often enough the case, the Republicans were set up for the smash.

"The Iraqi people made history today, and so did John Kerry with his unprecedented pessimism about today's progress in Iraq," said Mr. [Bush Campaign Spokesman Steve] Schmidt. "Kerry revealed his cynicism when he complained that not enough of the money he voted against is being spent and that the contributions of NATO and our allies aren't 'real.' "

Right in the kisser, Steve! Not to mention getting the word pessimism in--way to stay on message.

 
NY Times: Bush is Leading Kerry By a Point Buried in Story--Updated!

As usual you have to read deep into a story with the NY Times. The first half of the story is about how President Bush's approval ratings are the lowest in his presidency. In the 11th paragraph, they reveal that Kerry leads by one in a head-to-head matchup, and Bush by one with Nader in the mix.

However, once again it's registered voters, not qualified as likely. Many people don't vote although they say they do. Every pollster knows this. Many will say they're registered when they're not. They know it's expected of them and so they claim they did it. Many, many of those registered don't vote. In 2000 only 2/3rds of registered voters actually cast a ballot. And it should be pretty obvious that the ones who don't get around to doing it are the Democrats, because every time they switch to likely voters President Bush starts winning in the polls.

Crush Kerry has more on this. They also point us to Gerry Daly, who covers the polling beat.

Update: Kaus has much more. Turns out that Bush's approval ratings are NOT the lowest in his presidency, that they rose from last month, and that Kerry was winning by eight points in the last NY Times/CBS poll. Somehow the Times managed to spin that into bad news for President Bush!

 
SNAFU ?



The Prowler treats us to another excellent column today with three delicious Kerry tidbits.

1) BEAR ANY BURDEN
John F’n Kerry has put his Beantown mayor in a tight spot.
[S]ome Democrats in Boston say [Mayor] Menino may rue the day he got involved with Kerry.
"The Democratic Convention is a disaster. The city will not end up making the kind of money Menino was promising a year ago. Business is going to suffer. The union contracts have placed him in a terrible position and Kerry had done nothing to help him," says a Boston-based Democratic political activist.

2) KEAN INTEREST
Realizing that New Jersey, supposedly an easy win, is now up for grabs, the name of former Gov. Tom Kean (R), “who has proven himself a reliable tool of the Democratic members of the 9/11 Commission,” has been floated as possible VP.
"It's closer than many of us think it should be," says a DNC staffer. "But no one's freaking out about it yet. It's up to the campaign to fix what ever is wrong there."

3) BLAME IT ON RIO
Former prez Bill Clinton was in Las Vegas Sunday night for a Nevada Democratic Party fundraiser at the Rio hotel and casino, and, from reviews, didn't do John Kerry any favors.

 
Thank You Prime Minister Blair!

 
Toot-Toot-Tootsie, Don't Cry!



I think the glasses are gone for good. This has been pretty funny to watch.

 
Michael Moore, Face of the Democratic Party



Hugh Hewitt has pushed this issue for the last couple days and it deserves some attention. Michael Moore is not a fever swamp leftie, he's the voice of the Democrats. Read the attendees list for his Washington premiere:

The guest list, liberally sprinkled with members of Congress, political consultants and lobbyists, tipped decidedly to one side of the aisle. It included Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks; Paul Begala, a political adviser in the Clinton White House; Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, a former Clinton aide; Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader; and Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic national chairman.

Senator Bob Graham of Florida said, "There might be half of the Democratic Senate here."

That's revealing. Remember, Moore's audience for the weekend was maybe 3 million people. A little more than voted for Ralph Nader last time around. The kooks and the radio talk show hosts and some bloggers who felt they had to write about it. And half the Democratic Senate.

Hugh had a fabulous time ripping it apart on his show today--well worth listening to here.

 
Kerry: Standing Up for Dictators

Pejman Yousefzadeh points out that for a Democrat, Kerry seems remarkably nonchalant about the need for democracy elsewhere.

But John Kerry is not a fan of democratization, and doesn't seem to understand its palliative effects for security. His comments on the Varela Project are of a piece with comments that Kerry has made regarding democratization elsewhere around the globe. As this article points out, democratization isn't even a key priority for Kerry when it comes to Iraq. Rather, "stability" is the goal. And never mind that, as the article says, stability is "a term that could describe Saudi Arabia or Iran -- or the Iraq of Saddam Hussein."

We talked a little bit about Kerry's position on the Varela Project earlier, in conjunction with this David Brooks article which Pejman mentions as well.

 
Uh, John, What's This "We" Stuff?

Kerry of course could not issue a press release on the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq without taking a snipe at the president. But this one is pretty stupid, even by the International Man of Apology's standards:

It is absolutely stunning that of the $18 billion that we approved last year for the reconstruction of Iraq, only $400 million has been spent.

The $18 billion in question of course is part of the $87 billion that the Botoxicated Brahmin voted against last year; the balance of the money was allocated to supporting the military. So where does he get off saying "we approved". How about saying "It is absolutely stunning that only $400 million of the $18 billion that I voted against has been spent."

 
I'd Like to Play Poker With Blair



You can tell he just got what he was hoping for.

 
Thanks to Our Readers, Linkers and Commenters!

This last week was a real breakthrough for Kerry Haters. Crush Kerry highlighted us last Monday (and today as well), resulting in our second highest traffic day ever. Then on Thursday (correction--Wednesday), Right Wing News mentioned that we were one of the sites he had surfed to that afternoon. We must fit in well with John's readers, because today I checked out his site and we were listed as one of his top 20 referrers of the week, which means we'll be on his sidebar at least until next weekend. Kitty continued to recommend us tirelessly to her readers over at Kitty Litter.

The result is that our traffic for the week averaged over 300 visitors per day. On the weekend we did not have fewer than 200 visitors either day, a number that would have been thrilling for a weekday only a month ago. We had 250 visitors on Sunday, which was 100 more than the prior Sunday; as best I can tell there were no unusual links.

Thanks to you all, but most of all, Kitty!

 
Hot Time in Hub City



Kerry refused to cross this picket line of Boston's finest. The problem for him is that these guys are likely to picket the convention as well.

 
Legion Roundup

Crush Kerry highlights Drudge's story about the rush to unseal Kerry's divorce records and reminds us that Kerry's first wife had to sue him for child support. CK is one of my first stops every morning.

The Kerry Spot has lots of posts today. Jim Geraghty gives the pros and cons for some of the lesser names in the Veepstakes, and points out why Michael Moore's Fatundhate 9/11 is unlikely to help Kerry. We wish they'd learn about permalinks over at NRO, but Kerry Spot is worth a daily visit.

Right Wing & Right Minded Highlights an apparent goof in Fatundhate 9/11. In one of the films most moving scenes a woman describes the reaction to being told that her son had been killed in Iraq. The gaffe was caught by Tomfoolery of the Highest Order, who has quite a bit more on the Moore-on.

Vietnam Special Forces Vet Against Kerry always has a lot of good anti-Kerry content.

Catholic Kerry Watch points out that Kerry has respect for unions, but not for his church's teachings.

 
Kitty Corner

She's got a good post on Fatundhate 9/11, and asks, Where were you when the world stopped turning?

 
Kerry's Latin American Policy

Kerry released a statement yesterday setting forth his Latin American policy. Here's the nod to the fever swamp moonbats:

Stay Neutral in Free Elections: When the United States picks favorite candidates, we weaken the integrity of those political processes - and as often as not, our support can cause a backlash within a populace hypersensitive to meddling by the United States, as it did in Bolivia. -- Support Democratically Elected Leaders: Governments that uphold democratic principles deserve our support We should not countenance mob rule nor military force or inaction to oust an elected president, even an imperfect one such as Aristide in Haiti or Chavez in Venezuela. Instead, we should exercise our considerable diplomatic and moral force in support of democratically elected leaders.

Describing Aristide and Chavez as "imperfect" is like describing Michael Moore as "slightly overweight". Aristide ran a narco-trafficking government, and was not elected legitimately in 2000. As for Chavez, the sooner he is gone, the better. We hope it will happen with the proposed recall election, but as noted in the article he is recruiting paramilitary units.

 
The Invisible Man in the Rose Garden

Andrew Sullivan resurrects this option for Kerry. He makes it pretty obvious why the Lord of Louisburg Square should keep out of the limelight:

And so no one noticed. For almost the entire campaign, Kerry was essentially absent. And then, in a matter of a few weeks, he won it all. After all the deranged drama of Dean and the cheery charm of John Edwards, Kerry suddenly seemed a safe bet. Tedium was in. And when I say tedium, I mean levels of boredom that ordinary mortals cannot hope to emulate. The minute Kerry starts to speak, you can hear the life drain out of a room. When he appears on television, the right hand gravitates almost instinctively toward the remote. The word 'pomposity' doesn't quite capture the condescension of the man. Think Clinton's ambition matched with Gore's endlessly self-callibrating mind. Now remove all charm whatsoever. There's a reason he went un-noticed in the primary campaign. No sane human being would ever want to notice him. He's a human anti-histamine. He's Botox for the brain.

In a bizarre bit, Sullivan announces that Kerry's in the lead by four to eight points. But of course most of the recent polls have shown Bush in the lead.

Andrew's already announced that he's not supporting President Bush, and this passage shows it:

And the Bush team has yet to unleash its most vicious distortions of Kerry's record. By October, they'll be running ads making Kerry out to be a tax-raising, Commie-loving, atheist drag-queen.

That's just silly. Kerry's not a drag-queen!

 
Welcome Crush Kerry Readers!

My summaries of Douglas Brinkley's hagiography of John F'ing Kerry can be found here, here, here, here, here and in this place too. And here.

 
Ohioans, Beware Kerry Supporters!

We highlighed the story that ACT, a group that is supporting Kerry in the 2004 election, has hired convicted felons to go door to door registering voters. What kind of convicted felons?

Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman also noted that the ad did not encompass all the president's detractors.

"A strong member of the coalition of the wild-eyed, America Coming Together, hired convicted felons to register voters," he said. "In Ohio, it has been discovered that a murderer and a rapist are part of this effort."

John Fund has more.

That's one reason the Missouri Department of Corrections banned ACT from its list of potential employers for parolees in halfway houses. Noting that the felons would have to handle driver's license information and telephone numbers as part of the voter-registration process, the department concluded that "from a public safety standpoint, we didn't want offenders to be in a situation where they would be handling that information."

 
Another Republican for Kerry Sighted!



It does not look like Andrew to me.

Hat Tip: ACE

 
Purple Haze

The story of Kerry's first Purple Heart just won't go away . As I said in the earlier piece about "Tour of Duty", I'm not going to criticize him myself because I lack standing. But that doesn't mean I can't link to people who do.



I was the commanding officer to whom Kerry reported his injury on Dec. 3, 1968. I had confirmed that there was no hostile fire that night and that Kerry had simply wounded himself with an M-79 grenade round he fired too close. He wanted a Purple Heart, and I refused. Louis Letson, the base physician, saw Kerry and used tweezers to remove the tiny piece of shrapnel -- about 1 centimeter in length and 2 millimeters in diameter. Letson also confirmed that the scratch was inflicted with our M-79.

Just a stray thought here. If you've read the hilarious book, Catch-22, you'll know that one of the continuing themes is Yossarian's desire to get out of the war, and that this can be accomplished by flying something like 40 bombing missions. But by the time Yossarian has achieved this record, the number has been raised to 45, and then to 50 and beyond. You think Kerry was trying to get home, and he latched onto this one way? Of course, the hard part is that this was Kerry's first Purple Heart, not his third.

Hat Tip: I Love Jet Noise, Via Right Wing News.

 
This Was Predictable

Now that Jack Ryan has been forced to bow out from the race for the Senate due to the release of court papers in his divorce/child custody case, the race is on for the similar records from Kerry's first marriage, to Julia Stimson Thorne.

The Kerry campaign late Sunday called any old divorce digging a game of political "gutter ball."

"This is a trash hunt," said a senior Kerry source, who asked not to be named.

"No, I do not have a clue what is in the papers," explained the source. "But it is none of my business. And its none of your business, or any one's business... You're playing a game of gutter ball, Drudge."

They're right, but you'd have a hard time showing the difference between the release of the records in Ryan's case and Kerry's case. About the only difference I can see is the political party of the candidate.

 
More from the Tour

This is pretty funny. Brinkley makes a big point in the book that one of Kerry's opponents in the 1972 election, independent Roger Durkin, took to wearing a flag pin on his lapel, supposedly to remind people of the cover of Kerry's book. He also came up with a different nickname for Nuancy Boy: "A dressed-up Abbie Hoffman".

Now, Kerry's running for president and guess what he's wearing on his lapel:

 
Ted Rall Still Griping

Loser lefty and Hero Hater Ted Rall's cranky blog is entertaining, in a watching a train wreck way. For example, he notes this passage from a review of an anthology that includes an article by Rall:

Another gem is Ted Rall's scathing Father's Day "tribute" to the man who abandoned him and his mother. After an attempted reconciliation, Rall's father reneged on a promise to pay his son's college tuition, just as the boy was packing his bags for Columbia. "This year on Father's Day, I'm calling my real dad," Rall writes. "I'm calling Mom." The New York Times Magazine killed the essay. "I heard that it made some influential people on West Forty-Third Street feel `uncomfortable," Rall recounts.

You can read that and feel a little sympathy for Rall--it does not sound like he had a good father. But of course, that does not excuse him for being a turd--lots of people had bad dads and they didn't turn out bitter and mean-spirited the way Ted did.

And then Rall bitches at Michael Moore for not giving him a free ticket to attend Fatundhate 9/11. Ted's time is far too valuable to stand in line (and apparently he never heard that you can purchase tickets ahead of time).

Then comes the classic: Ted Rall Capitalism. He's trying to sell autographed copies of his two books. As a bonus to buyers of two books (about $44), for an additional $50 he'll throw in a sketch. But if you don't buy the book he wants $200 for the sketch (heh!).

 
Tour Completed!

Just finished Tour of Duty. There were some interesting tidbits in the last couple chapters:

Care to guess where Kerry took Teh-RAY-za on their first date? Remember, this is the guy who took Dana Delaney back to his apartment to show her his filmed reenactment of the incident that won him a Bronze Star. You guessed it, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Brinkley presents as fact the alibi that Kerry's brother and another campaign worker offered for their break-in to an office building housing the headquarters of a rival candidate. They claimed than an anonymous tipster had warned that Kerry's phones were going to be sabotaged, and that this amounted to a frameup of the two. Of course, how the anonymous tipster had known that the response of Kerry's brother would be to break into the office building is the weak link in this excuse.

Does this bit sound familiar?

"He could hardly believe that his hometown newspaper could deem him, John Kerry, a Silver Star winner, unpatriotic... Kerry had expected hardball. What he got, however, amounted to character assassination... "Suddenly my opponents were questioning my integrity," Kerry still fumed decades later.



The book goes on and on about poor John, and the vicious assaults on his character. Slammed by the press over the notorious cover photo on his book (shown above), Kerry feebly claimed that the upside-down flag is a distress signal (true) and that was why it was shown on the cover that way (probably false).

We do get a hint of what Nuancy Boy will be doing in December and January. Stung by his defeat in the 1972 congressional election, Brinkley reports that Kerry retreated to building model ships and airplanes.

I have intentionally avoided discussing almost all of the book that concerns Kerry's service on the Swift Boats. I never served, and I don't have any standing to criticize somebody who did. Kerry's conduct after leaving the battlefield is the only real issue with me.

 
More Tour of Duty

Some interesting tidbits:

Chapter 16 has the story about Colson informing the president (Brinkley says falsely), that Kerry was not sleeping on the mall, that he was staying at the home of friends of his wife. Of course, Brinkley has no way of knowing that this is false, other than the word of John Kerry, and it makes little sense that Colson would lie to Nixon in a private conversation. Colson also makes an interesting suggestion. "Destroy the young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader."

Later in that same chapter comes the discussion of Kerry' drug use. "Occasionally during his travels around America in 1971, usually with either Julia, or a fellow veteran, Kerry had smoked marijuana. Because he always played athletics, the idea of putting smoke in his lungs was essentially anathema to him. He never smoked pot while at Yale or in the Navy. But during his stint as a leader of VVAW, he occasionally indulged."

Kerry insists that he has not smoked since 1972, although it was widely reported that he mimed smoking a joint at a party last year where Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and & Mary was playing "Puff the Magic Dragon".

There are lots more tedious passages about Kerry. At times it seems like Brinkley is trying to pass him off as the grownup version of Gallant from the Goofus & Gallant cartoons in Highlights Magazine.

However, sometimes the truth shines through. When discussing the leadup to the debate on the Dick Cavett show, Brinkley notes that Kerry declined to debate John O'Neill on 60 Minutes and on an NBC Special with Edwin Newman. Wonder why? Could it possibly be because he knew he'd have a sympathetic host and audience?

 
Kerry's Wife Worth a Cool Billion

That's a lotta ketchup.

The Times said its estimates ranged from 900 million to 3.2 billion dollars. The estimates took into account living expenses and charitable contributions.

 
Runnin' On Empty



It's a marathon, John.

 
Cross Your Fingers

Here's a followup on that Oregon meeting that Ralph Nader had to get 1000 signatures:

By 6:30 p.m, low turnout seemed to put Nader's chances in doubt a second time. Elections officials said they had counted 1,150 people when the convention convened, leaving little margin for signatures that are later invalidated.

Despite the slim margin, Nader campaign spokesman in Oregon Mark McDougal said he remained hopeful. "These are Ralph's die-hard supporters" and their signatures will have a high validity rate, he said.

Republican-leaning groups had urged conservatives to attend and put the former Green Party leader on the ballot to foil Kerry's chances.

Indeed, we did.

 
Double Steyn

After the hilarious column, comes the serious column.

Giving bureaucrats new acronyms and smarter shoulder insignia won't make America more secure. What makes America more secure is going to where the terrorists are, killing large numbers of them, and fixing -- or at least neutralizing -- the dysfunctional states in whose murky waters they breed. Remember Sheikh Muqtada al-Sadr, the Khomeini-wannabe with the 10,000-strong Mahdi Army? He threw in the towel last week. And, of that 10,000, the 1st Armored Division estimates it killed "at least several thousand."

 
Another Steyn of Pale Ale

He takes on the Lyin' King's memoirs. Steyn's the absolute best writer in the business today, bar none, and this is one of his funniest columns.

The Clintons are in New Zealand and finally get to meet "Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea's mother had been named for."

Hmm. Edmund Hillary reached the top of Everest in 1953. Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, when Sir Edmund was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper and an unlikely inspiration for two young parents in the Chicago suburbs. I mentioned this in Britain's Sunday Telegraph eight years ago this very week, after this little story was trotted out the first time, but like so many curious anomalies in the Clinton record, it somehow cruises on indestructibly. By the time Sir Edmund shuffles off this mortal coil, the New York Times headline will read: "Man for Whom President Rodham Named Dies; Climbed Everest in 1947."

Let's hope he's wrong on that last point; President Rodham is not something I want to see in my lifetime.

 
Bumped to Top for Sunday Morning

I'm not playing any games. This is a wonderful post by RTG and you'll all thank me when you read it.

Wow!

IIRC Right Thinking Girl has been with us all along, and a fellow L-Dotter, but tonight we found her again in the comments section, this time with a link to her blog. It contained a grabber of a paragraph like this:

Instead, I'm dating her husband.

Sounds pretty tawdry, a little soap opera?

Un-uh. Instead it's beautiful. Hankie time, but you'll be glad you read it. One of the most moving posts I have ever read.

 
Hero or Zero?





Pretty interesting situation with the Breck Girl. If Kerry doesn't take him, he vanishes into the night. If Kerry does, he could be the next president (after of course, George W. Bush's second term).

This doesn't get talked about much but it deserves mention. One of the most obvious things about today's politics is that politicians may take the bottom part of the losing ticket in the hopes that theyll be the heir apparent.

Well, we went back to the history books and looked at the veep nominees of the candidates who'd lost and came back with the results. It ain't pretty.

In 2000, the losing Veep was Joe Lieberman, who had almost no success as the apparent heir to the Gore/Lieberman ticket. Let it be recorded that only one vice president received as many votes in the general election as Joe Lieberman. Did him zero good in 2004.

In 1996 Jack Kemp ran for Veep with Bob Dole; his boss got a pretty profitable side career selling viagra, Jack we presume is still appearing regularly on PBS extolling the virtues of UDAG grants.

Danforth Quayle defended the office of Veep in 1992, unsuccessfully.

In 1988 Lloyd Bentsen was chosen precisely because he was likely to sink without a trace, which he promptly did.

Geraldine Ferraro.


Walter Mondale.

Bob Dole.



Sarge Shriver.



Ed Muskie.


Bill Miller.

Henry Cabot Lodge.

Estes Kefauver.

John Sparkman.

Earl Warren (!)

John Bricker.

Dole in 1976 is the only loser on the Veep side of the ticket in the last 60+years who went on to run and win his party's nomination for the big job, and even with him it took another 20 years.

Conclusion: If the Breck Girl thinks this is the way to continue his political career, he's sunk. Obvious question, what has happenened to successful VP candidates who subsequently ran for the Presidency?

2000 Cheney Unknown but unlikely.

1996 Gore Lost 2000 Election.

1992 Gore Lost 2000 Election.

1988 Quayle Seems unlikely to win a nomination.

1984 Bush Won 1988

1980 Bush Won 1988

1976 Mondale Lost 1984

1972 & 1968 Spiro



1964 Humphrey

1960 LBJ

Even via winning the Veep job, your odds of winning the top spot are virtually nil.

 
Et Tu, Ralphus?

This is too funny for words.