Kerry stumbles over the truth

Forget about flip-flopping: The thing that bothers me about Kerry is the way he is piously telling people things that HE KNOWS are wrong.

This is most egregious on trade. Kerry is not a dummy (or so we're told). He has watched Bush's (truly stupid) steel tariffs backfire, dragging an economy of 300 million in order to save the jobs of a few thousand steel workers. He is familiar with the (stoopid) Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, which Hoover used to turn a sharp economic downturn into The Great Depression.

Yet, Kerry continues to tell cheering unions that to "protect" American jobs, the US must "get tough on trade"- play hardball with our trading partners, revise trade treaties and "protect" US jobs.

He knows those things won't work, and if elected, he wouldn't do them.

They'd be disastrous, and he knows it.

This is, after all, is man who voted FOR all those trade treaties, because he is well aware that trade is good for the economy.

Kerry knows better.

And the pattern continues in Iraq.

Iraq is our most important foreign policy experiment since World War II. If it fails, the age of nuclear terrorism will not be far away. And that war is likely to be on our soil.

Kerry says he will enlist the help of our "allies" and the UN. On occasion, he describes the whole Iraq venture as a waste of resources.

He knows better. He know it's important (he voted for the war, after all).

He also knows that France, Germany and Russia have no intention helping us AT ALL in Iraq, and that the UN is in no position to help much either.

But he hopes to win the votes of the Deaniacs, so he tells them what they want to hear.

And of course there are the entitlements (with politicians of either party, they are always there).

Like any politician in Washington, he knows that the US government is spending its way into catastrophe.

Kerry knows that the numbers do not lie, but he insists that Social Security and Medicare must be kept in their current disastrous states.

He knows that reform will have to come. He knows that the only open question is who will determine the terms of that reform: our elected officials or our creditors.

In most cases, Kerry is just playing politics, trying to win over factory workers, the dumb left or senior citizens.

That is what newspapers call it anyway.

Sixty percent of Americans think Kerry just tells people what they want to hear.

Sweet talking Kerry could just be considered misinformed.

But when Kerry himself knows better (and has demostrated so in the past), this activity goes by another name.

It is called lying.

- posted by total @ 3/24/2004 12:36:00 PM .