Watch the Donkey Flail

NEW YORK (AP) - Staking out new ground on Iraq, Sen. John Kerry said Monday he would not have overthrown Saddam Hussein had he been in the White House, and he accused President Bush of "stubborn incompetence," dishonesty and colossal failures of judgment. Bush said Kerry was flip-flopping.




New ground? This is to suggest that there's anything as solid as terra firma in Kerry's utterances, rather than the oozing mush we normally expect from the Empty Senator. Let's see how long he manages to stick to this before switching gears again to a Dean-like "But we're committed."




Less than two years after voting to give Bush authority to invade Iraq, the Democratic candidate said the president had misused that power by rushing to war without the backing of allies, a post-war plan or proper equipment for U.S. troops. "None of which I would have done," Kerry said.




Am I to assume that Kerry is the only guy in the U.S. Senate who was unaware of the fact that Chirac was going to support our operation when hell froze over, and that Schroeder was too busy running on "Bush = Hitler" to consider coming to our help? Or should I simply believe that the guy who voted against the supplementary funding bill for Iraq, then claimed to vote for it, and is now blaming the administration for not funding the war, is an idiot?


Is there anything that will get this silly bastard to stand on his vote?




"Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell," he added.




But typically, you're not only unwilling to put him in that place, you're willing to attack the guy who is, and render him unable to complete his job. So this acknowledgement of Saddam's wickedness serves only as dross for what your real goal is. Spare us.




"But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact:




What you mean "we," Kemo-sabe?




We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure."




Unproven. Please demonstrate that we are less safe than we were on the morning our largest city lost its largest buildings.




Bush hit back from a campaign rally in New Hampshire, interpreting Kerry's comment to mean the Democrat believes U.S. security would be better with Saddam still in power. "He's saying he prefers the stability of a dictatorship to the hope and security of democracy," the Republican incumbent said.



"Today, my opponent continued his pattern of twisting in the wind," Bush said. "He apparently woke up this morning and has now decided, No, we should not have invaded Iraq, after just last month saying he would have voted for force even knowing everything we know today."



Note the dynamic: Bush, the guy that everyone described as a feckless, mumbling blueblood dunce in 2000, is now pointing at his opponent and laughing at him. And unlike the lame "fuzzy math" quip he tried to foist on Gore, this barb has already stuck.




Both candidates addressed partisan crowds, drawing cheers and hoots as they stretched each other's records and rhetoric - mixing facts with political creativity toward the same goal: raising doubts about the other man's credibility.




In addition, both candidates were speaking English and breathing oxygen, although CBS has recently found documentation claiming that Bush is not a carbon-based life form.




Kerry called on Bush to do a much better job rallying allies, training Iraqi security forces, hastening reconstruction plans and ensuring that elections are conducted on time. But his speech was thin on details, with Kerry saying Bush's miscalculations had made solutions harder to come by.




Do you love that? Kerry is trying to pin his indecisiveness on Bush, claiming that the problem of defeating a guerrilla insurgency is apparently so novel and difficult that John Wayne Kerry can't begin to come up with a solution. Well, it's unsurprising. The last time we were trying to do that, Kerry bugged out before he finished his tour.




Bush cited Kerry's four-point plan and dismissed it as proposing "exactly what we're currently doing."




One of these guys is cribbing notes. I'm gonna give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who gets the defense briefings.




With more than 1,000 U.S. troops killed in Iraq, including nearly 900 since Bush declared an end to major combat, with free elections in doubt, reconstruction efforts stalled and violence and kidnappings on the rise, Iraq could be Bush's biggest political liability. Even some Republican senators have begun to publicly second-guess the president's policies.




Fair enough. It's hard to maintain resolve when things look rough. But Bush isn't gonna cut and run, and I don't see that we're at that point yet. Kerry seems to be prepping us to do exactly that.




But Kerry has failed to capitalize thus far, struggling for months to find a clear, consistent way to differentiate his views from those of his Democratic rivals during the primary season and, since the spring, his general election foe in the White House.



Kerry's advisers say they're not sure whether it is too late for the Democrat to make the Iraq critique resonate. Polls show voters favor Bush over Kerry on Iraq and terrorism. The president shines the spotlight on his foreign policy agenda with a visit Tuesday to the United Nations.




So one candidate is proudly displaying his agenda to a world he knows damn well is hostile to it, and one candidate's boys can't come up with anything more forceful than "not sure whether it's too late to make [it] resonate."


Which of these candidates is taking the initiative and running with it?




Kerry said in August that he would have voted in 2002 to give Bush war-making ability, even had he known no weapons of mass destruction would be found. He stood by the vote again Monday, saying the president needed to use the threat of force to "act effectively" against Saddam.



He made a distinction between that vote to grant a president war-making authority and what he himself would have done as commander in chief with such power.



"Yet today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious?" Bush's presidential rival said at New York University.




"Even though I say that, knowing what I know, I would do exactly the same thing in my power as a Senator to authorize military force, it's obviously pig-headed for the President to say that, knowing what he knows, he would to exactly the same thing in ordering military force."


What a schmuck.




"Is he really saying to Americans that if we had known there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to al-Qaida, the United States should have invaded Iraq? My answer is resoundingly no because a commander in chief's first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep America safe."




But. What. WOULD. You. DO????????




Kerry called national security "a central issue in this campaign," a bow to the fact that the race is being waged on Bush's terrain.



"Invading Iraq was a crisis of historic proportions and, if we do not change course, there is the prospect of a war with no end in sight," he said.



Kerry used the word "truth" a dozen times to say Bush had dodged it. That doesn't count the number of times he said the president "failed to level" with Americans or misled and confused them. He blamed Bush for "colossal failures of judgment."



"This is stubborn incompetence," he said.




Only if we lose, smart guy. Then it magically becomes world-changing courage. Now ask yourself the question: Can we win? If we can, and you think the President can't, then get off your deity-expletived high-horse and let us in on your strategy. It's go time.




Kerry has sounded more hawkish, as in December when Democratic primary rival Howard Dean said the world was not safer with Saddam out of power. Anybody who believes that, Kerry said, doesn't "have the judgment to be president."



Reading that quote to his GOP crowd on Monday, Bush cracked: "I could not have said it better."




I wonder if Kerry knows that Bush is using his own sound bites from the primary, the time when you're supposed to shore up your party base by getting in bed with the wings, to attack him in the general election, when you're supposed to run to the center. I wonder, if he knows, how he feels about that.




The running mates got into the act, too. "Iraq's a mess," said Democratic Sen. John Edwards, while Vice President Dick Cheney said Kerry offers only "confusion, weakness, uncertainty and indecision."




Couldn't have said it better myself.