Chris Matthews, who would probably interrupt a dying man's last words, "interviewed" the spokesmen from the Bush and Kerry campaigns last night on Hardball ---and made a very big deal of a supposed distortion made in a Bush campaign web ad of a response he elicited from John Kerry on 6 January 2004. The original exchange went thusly:
MATTHEWS: Do you think you belong to that category of candidates who more or less are unhappy with this war, the way it's been fought...Are you one of the anti-war candidates?
KERRY: I am -- Yes, in the sense that I don't believe the president took us to war as he should have, yes, absolutely.
Matthews' self-righteous objection to Bush's man, Matt Dowd, was that, in the web ad, only the first three words out of Kerry's pie hole were used ---before it cuts away to the very gay-sounding theme song from the 1960s TV show Flipper.
I noticed this, too, when I watched the ad the other night. But if that's all they got, then they got nothing.
Matthews asked Kerry if he was an anti-war candidate ---and Kerry said YES. That is the operative word, comrades: YES. Now, Kerry can leave all of the lawyerly wiggle room in that enunciation he wants and backfill it with "in the sense that" and blah, blah, blah ---but he answered in the affirmative and what he added to it in qualification does not negate what the answer is in its essence.
So what's the consequence? John Kerry voted to authorize the President's use of our military to enforce the UN resolutions and to provide for our defense against Saddamite Iraq. That's the bottom line.
Never mind the fact that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, does not actually require such an authorization except on political grounds. Never mind that Kerry's vote, as he himself knew when he cast it, was not subject to revision or extension, except rhetorically (which he has certainly since demonstrated). And never mind that in the sequel to that vote, Kerry decided against the $87 billion supplemental as a protest. Seems to me that the time to have lodged a protest would have been on the first vote. Of course, at that point, Kerry was not staring down the barrel of Howard Dean's pop-gun.
In the clearest, most damning way possible ---to a nation of TV-watchers and movie-goers--- this video I'm talking about is unanswerable. Kerry hangs himself over and over in a thoroughly documented slew of TV and print appearances that can leave no doubt that his position on Saddam has changed fundamentally in a very short period of time. And it was prompted by his own political opportunism.
Again, I strongly encourage you to go to KerryOnIraq.com and look at the video yourself.