Tony Blankley on McLaughlin Group (
9/24/2004):
"In August this year, Kerry at the Grand Canyon said he would have authorized the vote. And last week on Letterman he said no, he wouldn't. He's flip-flopped in the last two months."
John Kerry at Grand Canyon Nat'l Park (8/09/2004)
"Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have."
Late Show with David Letterman (9/20/04)
LETTERMAN: If you had been elected to president in 2000, November of 2000, would we be in Iraq now?
KERRY: No.
continued...
Friends, just try to believe this is the best they have on our man.
After surveying Kerry's 30+ years in public life, these mythical flip-flops are the best they could come up with, and account for about 50% of the BC04 campaign. Now those of us who supported Dean in the primaries would admit there are legitimate lines of attack with which the opposition could go after Kerry's position on the war. To some of us, it's not to Kerry's credit that he has continually trailed conventional wisdom when speaking about the ever changing situation in Iraq. You might call it timid. You might call it uninspiring. You might even call it calculated. But that line of attack was just not dumb enough to suit BC04's needs. They needed something far dumber.
I feel dumb just typing the words: flip-flop. Whenever it comes up, I literally feel like I am defending Kerry from charges of having cooties. That's just how dumb BC04 needed it to be. So they have this dumb sounding term for their dumb followers to chant and visualize (it helps), and it works for them. Here's how: the flip and the flop are like the ying and yang. Everything in the Kerry universe is defined elementally as either flip or flop. It is not necessary that items falling to one side or the other actual represent opposites ideas. It's the framework of flip-flop itself which provides the oppositeness. Any two statements will do, provided they do not align word-for-word.
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that each and every time Kerry utters a string of words that does not match verbatim some past utterance, BC04 will chalk up another flip-flop and start faxing members of "the fourth estate" about it. Ying. Yang. It's exactly that dumb. There is no defense against it. And we shake our heads and wonder if it is pride that most handicaps liberals, if it's just pride that will not allow them to "do the dumb things that need to be done" (at least not on purpose).
As many of you are aware, there was a lengthy article recently in SFGate.com that tried to suggest a more complicated framework in which to place the many non-identical sentences of John Kerry - one which took into account, for example, the meaning of words. Novel, but don't fall for it. This little monograph will not make the slightest dent in the prevailing dumbness. How could it? And is there anything that can save us from The Big Dumb?