In his Weekly Standard column Hugh Hewitt impressively opens a series on the Kerry Files with “The things they Kerry’d.”
Hugh begins his itemization of Kerry vulnerabilities with “NATIONAL SECURITY. Voters cannot trust John Kerry’s judgment or his resolve on issues of national security. From his April, 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to his statement on January 29, 2003, in a Democratic candidates’ debate that the war on terror is ‘primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation,’ Kerry has fundamentally misunderstood threats to national security and the best means to defend the United States against them.”
Hugh follows these items with:
MULTILATERAL MAN. The ‘Swiss-educated son of a foreign service officer,’ as Time Magazine described Kerry in its February 9 issue, is a fully-formed U.N. man, for whom the opposition of the U.N. to any proposed American initiative would mean at least temporary and perhaps permanent paralysis.
DEFENSE RECORD. As a senator, John Kerry has voted against the full funding of most major weapons systems of the past two decades, including the MX missile, the Patriot inteceptor, and missile defense deployment.
On the subject of gay marriage, Hugh notes that Kerry was one of fourteen sentators to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act — the federal law “that obstructs the automatic extension of Kerry’s home state’s embrace of gay marriage.”
Indeed, when Kerry opposed the act in 1996 — part of which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman — he compared the law to 1960s efforts in the South to criminalize interracial marriages and accused his supporters of engaging in the “politics of division.”
That information comes from yesterday’s AP story reporting that two years ago Kerry signed a letter with other congressional colleagues urging the Massachusetts legislature to drop a constitutional amendment outlawing homosexual nuptials.
The AP story further reports that the letter, organized by Rep. Barney Frank, was sent on congressional stationery on July 12, 2002 as the Massachusetts legislature first considered a constitutional amendment that limited marriage to “only the union of one man and one woman.”
“We believe it would be a grave error for Massachusetts to enshrine in our Constitution a provision which would have such a negative effect on so many of our fellow residents,” Kerry and 11 other members of the state’s congressional delegation wrote. Is it not apparent that Kerry is now attempting to square the circles he has previously drawn on this subject?
In this context I ask you to consider Professor Andrew Busch’s column describing the circumstances that have given rise to the possible case of buyer’s remorse that may set in among Democrats: “Game over.” (Courtesy of Peter Schramm and No Left Turns.)
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