KIM JONG-IL LICKS HIS CHOPS:

Would Kerry have won the Cold War? (Terence Jeffrey, August 25, 2004, Townhall)

Reagan's conventional military buildup, European missile deployment and refusal to cave on SDI broke the will of an evil empire.

Now, here's why this is important today: Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry opposed all the key policies Reagan used to win a bloodless victory in the Cold War.

In his first Senate race in 1984, Kerry championed the nuclear freeze. In September 1985, two months before Reagan met Gorbachev in Geneva, when freezeniks held their own Geneva summit, Kerry was their star. "Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., keynote speaker for the Geneva freeze meeting," United Press International reported at the time, "told the activists that 'if it were not for the freeze movement, I am confident that the government of the United States would not be in Geneva today talking with its Soviet counterparts.'"

In August 1986, two months before Reagan met Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Kerry fought to pre-emptively scuttle SDI. After a measure to steeply reduce SDI funding failed in the Senate, Kerry, according to the Associated Press, "called Star Wars 'a cancer' and said 'what we must do is deny this program the funds that would enable this cancer on our nation's defense to grow any further.'"

What about Reagan's buildup of conventional weapons (which still benefits U.S. forces today)? "(C)andidate Kerry in 1984 said he would have voted to cancel many of them -- the B-1 bomber, B-2 stealth bomber, AH-64 Apache helicopter, Patriot missile, the F-15, F-14A and F-14D jets, the AV-8B Harrier jet, the Aegis air-defense cruiser, and the Trident missile system," the Boston Globe reported.

So the Vietnam portion of the Kerry campaign lasts at least until the GOP convention, then we get a few weeks of him justifying his anti-war activities and Senate testimony, and only then do we get to the point where he has to defend his abysmal record as an elected official. Maybe the Democrats should have had contested primaries after all?

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 25, 2004 9:56 AM