{"id":2938,"date":"2004-10-29T10:55:41","date_gmt":"2004-10-29T17:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2004\/10\/thoughtful-analysis-and-stuff\/"},"modified":"2004-10-29T10:55:41","modified_gmt":"2004-10-29T17:55:41","slug":"thoughtful-analysis-and-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2004\/10\/29\/thoughtful-analysis-and-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughtful analysis and stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tMegan McArdle offers a thoughtful analysis of the presidential candidates and concludes that Bush is the lesser evil. If you’re into that kind of thing, go check it out. Here’s a teaser:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

What about Kerry? He’s been on the wrong side of pretty much every foriegn policy issue he addressed before he began running for president, from nuclear freeze to the first Iraq war. He’s been a borderline incompetent as a senator. I like Joe Biden, who is advising him on foreign policy, but that’s about all he has going for him. His votes since 9\/11 have been so coldly opportunistic that I, the ultimate political cynic, actually feel a little tinge of disgust. So though liberals keep telling me that 9\/11 changed everything, I have no way of knowing whether they changed John Kerry. Columns telling me to listen to what he’s saying elicit only a hollow laugh, since John Kerry has already made it abundantly clear that he’ll say pretty much anything to get elected. Not that this is exactly surprising behaviour in a politician.<\/p>\n

Does it matter? There’s a pretty compelling argument to be made that the Bush administration has screwed up so badly that it’s practically impossible that the Kerry team could be worse. I have two problems with this argument. The first is that the people who’ve been making it to me mostly hated Bush before Iraq, before 9\/11, and indeed before he got the Republican Party’s 2000 nomination. Bush could have been running the greatest foreign policy since Machiavelli, and they would still be arguing for me to take Kerry’s prospects on blind faith. And second, I’m not sure it’s true. Pulling out of Iraq would be worse than leaving a blundering administration there, and as Mickey Kaus said of The Economist’s Kerry endorsement “it’s always a shaky moment in these non-peacenik endorsements when the writer tries to convince himself or herself that Kerry won’t bail out on Iraq prematurely, isn’t it? (Kerry has been ‘forthright about the need to win in Iraq,’ but do you trust him and if so why? Because Andrew Sullivan’s blogging will keep him honest?)” Still, the administration has screwed up in some major ways, leaving me wrestling with the question: how bad could Kerry be?<\/p>\n

In the end, it comes down to how much risk the candidates will take. The Democratic policy on foriegn policy risk has been pretty much the same since McGovern: they won’t take any. They bug out at the first sign of casualties, and go in only when the foe is so tiny that we can smash them without committing ground troops.<\/p>\n

The Republicans take risk. Bush took on a lot of it — and with it, the possibility that something could go wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For me, the question is pretty simple: Kerry’s a pussy, Bush isn’t. I support Bush.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Megan McArdle offers a thoughtful analysis of the presidential candidates and concludes that Bush is the lesser evil. If you’re into that kind of thing, go check it out. Here’s a teaser: What about Kerry? He’s been on the wrong side of pretty much every foriegn policy issue he addressed before he began running for … Continue reading “Thoughtful analysis and stuff”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-Lo","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}