John Kerry was in Israel just before the July 4 holiday, stumping for Obama (and for his own candidacy as secretary of state?). He spoke like a hawk, saying, “Iran is a risk, a danger, a threat and a challenge, and we have to deal with it.”
Compare that statement with what he wrote in his blog on May 27, only one month earlier: “Curiously, many critics then hype Ahmadinejad as a threat of historic proportions, thereby granting the stature they seek to deny.”
It’s deja vu all over again. John Kerry blows whichever way the wind blows. For his MA audience, he’s dovish, playing to our war-weariness and wariness; in Israel, he’s a hawk, stumping for Jewish support for Obama. All we can say for sure is that he’s a very strange bird. No wonder he’s afraid of Ed O’Reilly.
To be fair, Kerry is not the only American politician to suddenly morph into a hawk when stepping into Israel…
<
p>and if “we have to deal with [Iran]” means ‘sitting down with Ahmadinejad’ I guess this is not a FP reversal after all
I was hoping that Kerry was rightly saying that the man Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not a threat. He isn’t — Ahmadinejad is a glorified spokesman increasingly on the outs with Iran’s true leaders. Unfortunately, reading thgta full text reveals that Kerry was using Ahmadinejad as a rhetorical proxy for the government of Iran, which is about as accurate as using Horst Kohler as a rhetorical stand-in for the government of Germany.
<
p>It’s bad enough that Kerry’s continuing to hype Iran, but worse still that he’s another victim of fundamental ignorance about its system of government.
No small thanks to our government.
<
p>And, the two quotes above are not inconsistent on their faces.
<
p>Just because the torturephile faction wants to bomb Iran does not mean that peaceable people should play dumb.
<
p>Don’t, in other words, automatically deny something just because Paul Wolfowitz or his buddies cite it for their own purposes.
<
p>You may have a beef about Kerry–certainly he could have been better on the Iraq war–but this so-called straddle is unconvincing.
It’s not the facial inconsistency that is most troubling, but the significance of Kerry’s ‘tough talk’ in the context of US-Iran rhetoric. That context is skewed by neo-con war-mongering (I like your ‘torturephile faction’). The result is similar to the Iraq invasion vote, where we knew what “authorization to use force” meant, even though Kerry (and Clinton and others) pretended to think these words were a plan to engage in diplomacy.
<
p>The statement by Kerry in Israel is a series of code words in international relations that convey (especially in a neo-con environment) a hawkish stance — “risk, danger, threat, challenge,” and “deal with it.” I am sure he understands this.
<
p>Kerry’s blog, on the other hand, is a series of code words that convey (in Massachusetts, at least) a dovish stance — “curiously, critics, hype, historic proportions, stature.” I am sure he hopes we will believe he is a dove at heart and can be trusted to sound hawkish.
<
p>When you look past the face of whatever he says and consider the context and the cumulative picture, you see Kerry is a man of smoke and mirrors, not of conviction and integrity. I don’t trust him to represent us in the senate.
…derrico still doesn’t have a disclosure in his sig line, or anywhere in his BMG listings, that indicates he is not just an EOR supporter, he’s actually a very senior member of EOR’s campaign staff? Imagine our collective surprise!
<
p>Oh, and by the way, while we have your atention — why the hell is EOR cruising around the PUMA (“Party Unity My Ass”) websites and posting appeals for campaign funds to the disaffected “If you don’t depose Obama and insert Hillary in his place as nominee instead we’re all gonna vote for McCain instead” crowd, anyway? Is that the way the self-styled true-Democrat candidate intends to build up his deep blue base so he can sweep the Senate this year?
<
p>Give us a flippn’ break, yo…
The main PUMA blog is here.
Typical posting from EOR, to just one of a number of PUMA blogs:
<
p>http://hillbuzz.blogspot.com/2…
<
p>Typical PUMA blogger shows EOR some love:
<
p>http://heidilipotpourri.blogsp…
http://heidilipotpourri.blogsp…
Well, it is very odd that O’Reilly, who makes the AUMF vote central to his campaign, should be so warmly endorsed by Hillary Clinton voters when the AUMF vote was what gave Barack Obama the political space in which to run in the first place. It seems ironic. To borrow a phrase from Leonidas, someone must be suffering cognitive dissonance.
<
p>However, O’Reilly didn’t dip into PUMA-mania and say he was running to punish Kerry for his support of Obama, or say that the DNC’s dereliction of media pushback warranted a vote for McCain.
<
p>PUMA is a rather odd world. Its founder donated $500 to McCain in 2000 but tells the media that she is actually very fond of Al Gore to whom she gave nothing and that she is an ardent Democrat.
<
p>In any case, from what I see, O’Reilly seems respectful of PUMA but “uninfected”. So I’m not ready to get too excited about this angle. There are other angles that I find more disturbing.
…simply putting { “ed o’reilly” puma } into my Google search box came up with a very long list of relevant links, including this nice little summary of just one typical site:
<
p>
<
p>And then, of course, there’s this widely-reproduced message board entry from one of the one of the grandmother of all PUMA forums:
<
p>
<
p>Anyway, not that there’s anything wrong with people supporting HRC or EOR either, you understand, but I do think it’s safe to say that he is recognizing and reaching out to a certain shared base of people with leftover bitter tastes in their mouths here…
<
p>Just my $.02, of course. YMMV.
that he is no longer a part of the staff but remains a supporter.
<
p>I’m guessing you were the one person who voted in favor of Orwellian leaders?
<
p>and btw, how do I get added to the Kerry campaign’s Internet Damage Control Notification System?
I don’t know from any such alleged System, Leonidas. If there even is such a thing, I ain’t in or on it.
<
p>I don’t work there any more, haven’t for going on a coupla months now, and it’s not like I sit down and swap text messages with my ex-colleagues or anything now that I’ve moved on. Even then, I was a full-time staffer who wrote in-house, not some kind of mythical stealth blogger. Maybe you should call their offices if you want to volunteer for Kerry in that regard instead. They’ll probably blow you off, but hey, ya never know.
<
p>I will assume that you are speaking the truth that derrico is no longer allied with the EOR campaign in an official capacity, hence does not need to disclose — just as I am no longer allied with the JK campaign, though I still disclose inline anyway just to make sure nobody gets confused. That’s my own choice, his is apparently a different one, but that’s fine too. Whatever works.
<
p>And I don’t know WTF you mean by my somehow being “the one person who voted in favor of Orwellian leaders” in this context, but I have to admit, watching EOR’s increasingly high-pitched, overly-amped, spittle-flecked rant playing out live on the big screen at the convention in Lowell back in June kinda reminded me of that famous scene from ‘1984’…
<
p>”One person who voted for?” Um, I seem to recall that while EOR did manage to wrangle a certain amount of generic protest vote in Lowell, he still got totally crushed by an overwhelming majority in the state delegate counts anyhow. So you might want to try recalibrating your vote-tabulating spinmeter device before digging a deeper hole for your guy here.
and if the kerry flash-mob stuck around longer they may be able to comprehend a thing or two about this blog
I suppose if I were part of such a thing, it wouldn’t have taken me a long day and a half before I noticed this sunken thread and posted on it after it was stone cold, which even then I did just for the record. I was busy following the Netroots Nation stuff instead.
As this post slips into the mists of time, I notice no comments by the usual “flash mob” participants. And yes, I do think it’s odd that some people only comment about Kerry. However, there seems to be an equal number of pro-Kerry as anti-Kerry people about whom that can be said.