Monday, October 04, 2004

Did Kerry cheat?

I sat up until 4:00 a.m. a few nights ago watching the Bush-Kerry debate. Having followed Kerry’s progress from the primaries I had to admit that he performed better than I expected. Not to say that he was good- just better than I thought he would be. His garbled message still makes no sense in a post-9/11 world. This is not the time or place for a shameless opportunist like Kerry who has no moral backbone.

As for his plans? Well, France and Germany have already announced that they won’t be sending any more troops, Iran doesn’t want his nuclear material (gee, thanks for that plan, John), and China says that the entire international community knows that bilateral talks are not the way to go in N. Korea. So, let me see- what does that leave exactly? His secret plan to bring the troops out of Iraq in six months while concurrently sending up to 40,000 more. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s not just a backbone that Kerry’s missing, but a brain too?

One thing that has emerged from the debates (apart from the near hysterical media coverage claiming Kerry won- yeah, he can talk well for ninety minutes and keeps his self-contradictions down to a few, but it doesn’t exactly make up for a 20 year span of…nothing in the Senate) is the claim that Kerry might have cheated by bringing something into the debate with him- perhaps a cheat sheet? While this has been ridiculed by the left as inconsequential (gee, get over it, it’s only a bit of paper) and dismissed by Kerry’s team (“this is just another Republican distraction- step away from our candidate, do not pay attention to our candidate or anything he says; he’s running against Bush don’t you know”) the simple fact of the matter is that if Kerry did indeed bring something in with him it’s cheating. Is this what you want from the POTUS? People constantly claim that Bush “misled” them, that he lied, that he can’t be trusted- well, if Kerry can’t be trusted to abide by rules that he and his team agreed to, how the heck can he be trusted if he makes it into the Oval Office? If he’ll cheat over something as minor as a debate with Bush, then how do you know he isn’t cheating about a whole lot more- Christmas in Cambodia, his medals, throwing his medals away, his medal citations, the meeting to discuss the assassination of a Senator {well, okay, he owned up to this one- after lying about it}, his Chinese Communist assault rifle- need I go on? In fact, on whole, Kerry is the one who had displayed a complete inability to be truthful over the course of this campaign- not George Bush. How do you know he won’t “cheat” a hell of a lot more if he gets into the most powerful office in the world?

The second thing about this possible cheating episode is this- if Kerry needs a cheat sheet to debate with Bush (and as much as I admire the guy I’m the first to admit that he’s not the best debater or public speaker in the world) then how’s he going to cope when he comes up against an antagonistic foreign leader? If he doesn’t know the facts on foreign policy (and I’ll bet there are hundreds of bloggers who can rhyme this stuff straight off the top of their heads, no preparation required)- on his own foreign policy for that matter- then is this really the guy who should be running the world’s most powerful nation? If he doesn’t have the nerve to face down Bush in a simple debate, then how’s he going to perform when the chips are down and something real is at stake- say the safety of America?

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