The Washington Post has posted an interview with John Kerry. The Post’s Lois Romano sees Kerry as having finally emerged from Ted Kennedy’s shadow to become “involved in just about every policy initiative and major piece of legislation before the Senate these days.”
I didn’t watch the interview , but the Post has highlighted three pearls of wisdom from the man who fancied himself, and was fancied by so many liberals, as vastly superior intellectually to President Bush:
FIrst:
I want to make certain that we’re not committing troops [in Afghanistan] to something that, by defiinition, is unachievable.
There are some things that, by definition, are unachievable. A bachelor can’t have dinner with his wife. But nothing anyone is proposing in Afghanistan is unachievable by definition. Success in Afghanistan may be unachievable under the assumptions liberals like Kerry make, but that’s something different. A successful surge in Iraq was impossible under liberal assumptions, but the surge was successful nonetheless.
The only way to know whether Gen. McChrystal’s plan cannot achieve success is to implement it. That’s not sufficient reason to implement it, of course; one must instead assess its likelihood of succeeding. But this should be done through a hard-headed analysis of the conditions on the ground; not through the kind of a priori reasoning implied by Kerry’s talk about what’s definitionally impossible.
Second:
There is no silver bullet: No single step is going to deal with climate change.
How disillusioning. Next, someone’s going to tell us that global temperatures have been stable for a decade and are expected to remain stable, or drop, for another decade or two.
Third:
Iran’s president is obviously so quixotic and engages in such insulting. . .rhetoric that it’s very hard to tell sort of where he’s coming from.
Perhaps he’s coming from a nasty, unstable place.
A left-liberal who hears an anti-American tyrant talking nicely has no trouble concluding that the tyrant’s words reflect where he’s coming from. But when such a tyrant talks belligerent, the left-liberal is baffled. Why is that? I would have thought it easier to read an anti-American tyrant who is insulting the U.S. than one who is sweet-talking us.
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