KERRY'S BACKFIRE
The other day Sen. John Kerry accused President Bush of lying to the country in the runup to war in Iraq. The "lies" centered on Iraq's ability to attack the US with WMDs and its possession of such weapons, and with the diplomatic games in the UN prior to the war, and so forth. Kerry's move was a pre-primary ploy to shore up his credentials with the left, which has all along insisted that everything the Bush administration has done from 9-11 forwards has been nothing but a house of lies. 9-11? Bush planned it. War in Afghanistan? Fought for a pipeline. War in Iraq? Blood for oil, or to advance a nefarious scheme to remake the MidEast. You know the drill.There's evidence today that Kerry's move will backfire. In a lefty anti-war newsletter that arrived in my inbox this morning, Charles Jenks says he's not buying Kerry's new claims:
Senator John Kerry says he - in fact "every one of us" - was misled by President Bush concerning Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. And he says the deception is one reason he is running for President
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If John Kerry had been interested in the truth, why did he refuse to meet with his Western Mass constituents before voting for the war resolution? Why did he close his Springfield office on October 11 - shutting out his constituents - in the aftermath of his vote in favor of war?
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In October, 2002, 23 Senators and 133 Representatives voted against the Bush Administration's war resolution. John Kerry voted for it. What did 156 Members of Congress know that Kerry did not know? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his constituents had called him, urging him to vote against war. After he voted for war, over 20,000 constituents wrote in the name of Randall Forsberg, who ran against him in a last minute write-in anti-war campaign in November.
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John Kerry had ample opportunities to discern the truth, before he voted for the war resolution in October, 2002 and during the build up to the invasion. He says that the Bush administration misled everyone. 156 of his colleagues in Congress would disagree; they voted against war. And, thousands of his constituents would disagree - they called his office or voted for his write-in opponent in November. After the deaths of between 5567 and 7240 civilians in Iraq as of this date (per the Iraq Body Count Project - http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ ) with almost daily shooting deaths of both US soldiers and Iraqi during the occupation (not to mention the thousands of Iraqis who will die due to destructions of infrastructure and health care systems, continuing violence and exposure to the hundreds of tons of depleted uranium residue left in Iraq from US and UK munitions), Senator Kerry speaks out.
He says was misled. Perhaps he was not as sharp as his 156 colleagues and thousands of constituents. Could there be a darker possibility? Could he have realized the truth and for political reasons went along, knowing that he could claim later - after things had started to go badly - that he had been misled, along with "every one of us."
Keep in mind the source here. Jenks is part of an outfit called the Traprock Peace Center, an anti-war group based in Kerry's own state. If his "I was misled" line didn't work for them, it just didn't work. The anti-war left was its target audience.
What the "misled" line seems to have done is the opposite of what Kerry wanted. He intended it to make inroads into Howard Dean's far left base, but if Jenks and his group are representative of that base, all it has done is anger them and driven them further left, weakening Kerry and strengthening Dean.
The "misled" line obviously isn't playing with the middle and right either, where President Bush's war stance still enjoys broad popular support in spite of the lack of WMD discoveries in Iraq to date. In claiming to have been misled, Sen. Kerry may have misled himself right out of electability.