Loyal Democrat Matt Yglesias was not impressed by the Kerry acceptance speech:
To put it politely, I thought that was crap.
…Not every speech needs specifics and not every speech needs to be short, but if your speech is going to be long, then it really ought to have some specifics. Otherwise it’s just bloated. Mainly, I’m pissed about Iraq. How to handle Iraq is the most important question facing the president and he just punted. On other looming foreign policy issues (Iran, North Korea, Sudan) where, again, the president can pretty much do whatever he wants we are left with no idea of what a President Kerry would want to do. Nor do we even have a particularly smart backward-looking critique of the Iraq War. It’s bad, of course, that the president wasn’t straight with the American people about the case for war. Nevertheless, if the deception had been in service of a wildly successful policy, this would be the kind of thing one could more-or-less shrug off. Similarly, contrary to Kerry’s accusation Bush didn’t go into Iraq without a plan, he went in with a bad plan. But Kerry doesn’t get into any of this. Nor did he so much as mention our general strategic situation in the Middle East, offering an opinion one way or the other about the alliances with Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
I agree with Yglesias. Fifty minutes with a mike and every news camera in the national media on him and all Kerry has to say is “I served in Vietnam” about 18 times and “I’ll be a good president.”
Kerry needs to explain why he voted for the Iraq War and then against the funding, when the latter vote was “reckless and irresponsible” by his own declaration. He needs to lay out the specifics of a plan to combat terrorism, and just blinding assuming that the French, Germans, Russians, Chinese, and Saudis are on-board with whatever Kerry wants to do, when and if he makes up his mind, isn’t going to cut it.
We’re all for jobs, free drugs, good schools, and Helping The Children, but we need to know how any politician who wants our vote intends to accomplish those things, and there was no meat in the Kerry speech on any subject other than his four months of heroic Vietnam service.
Democrats do like to honor the military for a couple of days every four years, but nobody in this country with a two-digit IQ or higher really believes they have any commitment to a strong national defense, so we’re left with a great, large load of steaming rhetorical gas that amounts to exactly nothing.
Watching the speech I had the feeling that Kerry was running for King of some European country, not for president of the USA. Note to Kerry:
It’s not really just a ceremonial position unless you have a VP like Cheney, and if you’re so godawful intellectually curious, worldly, and down-right-fucking-smart, you should be able to show us how all of that brain power translates into policy and action in the 21st century. Do you have a professional campaign staff, or just a bunch of volunteer envelope-stuffers?
H/T Blair-Welch Project.
It’s only chickenhawks that do the “Democrats are weak on defense” schtick.
Anybody that knows anything about the defense business knows the real deal in this regard.
It’s actually counter-productive to our nation’s defenses to spend billions on outmoded weapons designed based on the threat being a non-existent Soviet Union.
This administration has been woefully weak on our nation’s defense.
I’m dragging my feet when it comes to blogging about this. I’m dreading reading the speech, but I guess I’ll have to read it to provide a “fair” assessment!
So get with it, woman – the world is waiting with bated breath.