KERRY'S WHACKOUT LOGIC
Lying About His Position on the War

From James Taranto's Best of the Web Today and the article in reference is below:

BUSH LIED!!!! by Telling the Truth
The San Francisco Chronicle's Debra Saunders got a chance at an editorial board meeting last week to quiz John Kerry about his claim that President Bush "misled" him into backing the liberation of Iraq:

Kerry says he believed the resolution tied President Bush to promises to build an international coalition, to work with the United Nations and only go to war as a last resort. A disappointed Kerry now says Bush failed in all three venues. . . .

A month before Kerry's "yes'' vote, Bush went to the United Nations and said the following: "Saddam Hussein has defied the United Nations 16 times. Not once, not twice--16 times he has defied the U.N. The U.N. has told him after the (Persian) Gulf War what to do, what the world expected, and 16 times he's defied it. And enough is enough. The U.N. will either be able to function as a peacekeeping body as we head into the 21st century, or it will be irrelevant. And that's what we're about to find out.''

Bush told the U.N. that if it failed to act, America and its allies would--as indeed they did. So where's the deception? Saunders:

Kerry's answer was that Washington insiders believed that Bush didn't mean what he said. "I think that you had a hard-line group (then Pentagon adviser) Richard Perle, (Deputy Defense Secretary) Paul Wolfowitz and probably (Vice President Dick) Cheney. But when Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker (former advisers to the first President Bush) weighed in, very publicly in op-eds in the New York Times and the (Washington) Post, the chatter around Washington and (Secretary of State Colin) Powell in particular, who was very much of a different school of thought, was really that the president hadn't made up his mind. He was looking for an out. That's what a lot of people thought."

What about what Bush said to the U.N.? That was "rhetorical," Kerry answered. And "a whole bunch of very smart legitimate people" not running for president thought as he did. "So most people, actually on the inside, really felt that (Bush) himself was looking for the way out to sort of satisfy Cheney, satisfy Wolfowitz, but not get stuck." Kerry continued, "The fact that he jumped and went the other way, I think, shocked them and shocked us."

So Bush "misled" Kerry by telling the truth! As Saunders observes, "The scariest part is that Kerry looked as if he believed what he said."


Kerry's complicated exfoliation
San Francisco Chronicle
Debra J. Saunders
Wednesday, March 3, 2004

IT'S AN ODD campaign gimmick, but Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., often tells voters that he was "misled" and that's why he voted for an October 2002 resolution authorizing military force against Iraq. (full article)