Brit Broadcasting Conservatism

There really is no going back for John Kerry now. He's made The Last Flip-Flop, and he'd better hope it was the right one. In Philadelphia today, he said -

"The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy, al-Qaida," Kerry said in a speech at Temple University. "There's just no question about it. The president's misjudgment, miscalculation and mismanagement of the war in Iraq all make the war on terror harder to win."

Kerry said Iraq has become a haven for terrorists since the war, and he offered a detailed strategy to contain terrorism while drawing a sharp distinction between his and the president's views on national security.

"George Bush made Saddam Hussein the priority. I would have made Osama bin Laden the priority," Kerry said. "I will finish the job in Iraq and I will refocus our energies on the real war on terror."

The battlelines are finally being drawn. Now Kerry has relaunched his campaign and appears to be sticking fairly consistently to his point of view. Our gut reaction might be to be fearful of this, because it would have been so much easier to win the election when nothing even remotely interesting was issuing from the Kerry campaign. However, I propose that we're actually better off having Kerry speaking his mind and showing his true colours. If he continues like this he's going to get defeated anyway, with the added bonus that it will not just be a defeat for John Kerry but for the ideas he is espousing. Glenn Reynolds might well have a point when he says that Kerry or his aides now expect to lose, which is why his campaign is starting to look more and more consistently demented.

Kerry is making this election essentially a referendum on the Bush Doctrine. That's what he and his Party wanted from the start, and at least now they're being honest about it. I suggest that as well as getting rightfully indignant and being dissapointed when Kerry disparages our allies and denigrates the Iraq mission, we also allow ourself a little smile. Because it's going to make him lose, and those ideas are going to lose with him. Then in the next four years, the unfolding reality of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan will put the nail in the coffin. With the bankruptcy of the Left's ideas on foreign policy and terrorism exposed, it'll be time for them to do some reconstruction of their own.

Meanwhile, Arthur Chrenkoff sums up brilliantly what's wrong with the Left at the moment and their inability to do anything but criticise -

I really despise the condescension of spoiled, comfortable, middle class Western brats who have no idea of life and realities outside their comfy liberal cocoon. If blogs were around some fifteen years ago, somebody like "sipples" would have been writing the oh-so-hilarious commentary on the struggle of post-communist countries to build a better, normal life for themselves: "Have you read about this collective farm outside Grodno? The peasants decided to privatise it and divided all the land and property among themselves. The only problem is... there aren't any cows left. HA HA HA!"

Face it, you and your merry company are just a pimple on the ass of an asterisk in a footnote of the history of progress from tyranny to freedom.

But read the whole thing (as if you couldn't after that last line).

P.S Has anyone noticed how frequently the Kerry campaign has been calling their opponents "un-American" recently? I thought the Left considered that phrase to be, well, "un-American"?