February 24, 2004
THE PASSION:
Kerry's Inner Dove (Joshua Muravchik, February 23, 2004, washingtonpost.com)
When he won election to the Senate in 1984, Kerry said that the "issue of war and peace" remained his "passion." As a first major foreign policy cause, he championed the "nuclear freeze." Later Kerry battled Sen. Sam Nunn, a hawkish Democrat who chaired the Armed Services Committee, over the funding of research into missile defense, which Kerry wanted to slash.The litany of weapons systems that Kerry opposed included conventional as well as nuclear equipment: the B-1 bomber, the B-2, the F-15, the F-14A, the F-14D, the AH-64 Apache helicopter, the AV-8B Harrier jet, the Patriot missile, the Aegis air-defense cruiser and the Trident missile. And he sought to reduce procurement of the M1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Tomahawk cruise missile and the F-16 jet. Time and again, Kerry fought against what he called "the military-industrial corporate welfare complex that has relentlessly chewed up taxpayers' dollars."
Kerry was one of the Senate's strongest critics of President Ronald Reagan's policies of military resistance to Communist inroads in this hemisphere. When U.S. troops intervened in Grenada, Kerry denounced the action as "a bully's show of force." Kerry lent his name to Medical Aid for El Salvador, a political group that brought humanitarian aid to regions of that country held by Communist guerrillas. And he made himself one of the Senate's most vigorous opponents of aiding the anti-Communist contras as a means of pressuring Nicaragua's Sandinista regime. "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell them what to do," said Kerry. He and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) traveled to Managua to try to work their own peace deal with strongman Daniel Ortega and thus undercut U.S. policy. Kerry justified this by saying Reagan had failed "to create a climate of trust" with the Sandinistas.
Do even Democrats want a president who has consistently trusted our enemies more than us? Posted by Orrin Judd at February 24, 2004 08:44 AM
oj:
Kerry was a strong critic of military response to Communist expansion.
Isn't that your position ?
That it would have been better to let them wildly over-reach, and collapse from within even sooner than the USSR did ?
Michael:
We should have dispatched the USSR after WWI. We should have after WWII. When we cjhose not to we should have just withdrawn and let them collapse from within. We didn't, we engaged in the Cold War. Having done so we needed to win and the easiest way to wage such a war, as we found to our chagrin in Vietnam, was by proxy--the mujahadeen, the contras, Jonas Savimbi, etc.. Detente was the only unacceptable solution, because it involved us legitimizing communist dictatorship.
Posted by: oj at February 24, 2004 10:01 AMOJ:
Seems increasingly apparent Democrats just want a President who is NOT GWB - whatever that candidate may think.
Posted by: John Resnick at February 24, 2004 01:44 PMJohn:
Yes, that gets them to 40%. Unless anti-war, anti-trade, anti-Israel folk defect to Nader--then they're at 38%.
Posted by: oj at February 24, 2004 01:57 PM"Trusting our enemies more than us" is a pretty fair description of most remaining Democrats these days. Gonna be hell for them to get independants with that line, let alone pull away any of Bush's Base.
Posted by: MarkD at February 24, 2004 08:20 PMMark D.,
Great bumper sticker! Ranks up there with OJ's:
"Kerry ... Ted Kennedy with a fresh liver."
I had forgotten about Kerry's trip to Managua. He and Jim Wright (and the others) should have prosecuted under the Logan Act.
Posted by: jim hamlen at February 25, 2004 09:20 PM