Boston Fog Machine
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James Joyner | Saturday, March 13, 2004 |
David Brooks’ op-ed this morning, “The Boston Fog Machine,” sets forth what will almost certainly be the Republican campaign against John Kerry:
The 1990’s were a confusing decade. The certainties of the cold war were gone and new threats appeared. It fell to one man, John Kerry, the Human Nebula, to bring fog out of the darkness, opacity out of the confusion, bewilderment out of the void.Kerry established himself early as the senator most likely to pierce through the superficial clarity and embrace the miasma. The gulf war had just ended. It was time to look back for lessons learned. “There are those trying to say somehow that Democrats should be admitting they were wrong” in opposing the gulf war resolution, Kerry noted in one Senate floor speech. But he added, “There is not a right or wrong here. There was a correctness in the president’s judgment about timing. But that does not mean there was an incorrectness in the judgment other people made about timing.”
For you see, Kerry continued, “Again and again and again in the debate, it was made clear that the vote of the U.S. Senate and the House on the authorization of immediate use of force on Jan. 12 was not a vote as to whether or not force should be used.”
In laying out the Kerry Doctrine â that in voting on a use-of-force resolution that is not a use-of-force resolution, the opposite of the correct answer is also the correct answer â Kerry was venturing off into the realm of Post-Cartesian Multivariate Co-Directionality that would mark so many of his major foreign policy statements.
***
Kerry has made clear that if he is elected president, the nation will never face a caveat shortage. He has established the foragainst method, which has enabled him to be foragainst the war in Iraq, foragainst the Patriot Act and foragainst No Child Left Behind. If you decide to vote for him this year, there would be a correctness in that judgment, but if you decide to vote for George Bush, that would also be correct.
Heh.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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Kerry has made clear that if he is elected president, the nation will never face a caveat shortage.
What a line!
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