I guess it's time for a little rhetorical bomb throwing, starting with the title - but as a reaction to a diary calling out the leading Dem in the House as an idiot, it seems only appropriate.
My point is this: John Kerry gave the right answer, the only good answer, to the hypothetical question: "Knowing what you know now, would you have voted to go to war in Iraq?"
The key is in the hypotheticals.
This question is deliberately phrased in a hypothetical manner so as to be misleading.
It's a trap, a trick question, which is why Bush kept asking it until Kerry stood up and gave the
right answer, thereby causing the media pundits and a ton of blogosphere folks to have a giant bug out, convinced that Kerry was... either ill-advised, or just plain stupid.
We're in Iraq now, and we need to stabilize it and get out. We need real leadership to do that. We can't turn back the clock and we can't have the Congress vote over again. The president, as Commander in Chief, has to lead during wartime given the facts as they are now.
Why, then, did Bush conjure up a hypothetical question asking us to look differently at a very real situation in the present by imagining what would have happened?
It's to trick us, those of us who wish to God we'd never been misled into this miserable clusterf*&k of a war, into declaring Kerry's answer wrong. It's to make us look at a hypothetical situation - the possibility of never having invaded Iraq - and blame Kerry for the reality of the mess we have now.
The fact is, George W Bush is responsible for this war. The fact is, hypothetical situations are only useful as campaign rhetoric; whoever is president next January will be responsible for this war. We are asking John Kerry to step in and clean up George W Bush's mess and everybody knows it's a hell of a tough job. If Kerry says "No, I would not have voted for the Iraq war resolution," he effectively disavows responsibility for this mess. Now, we'd be perfectly happy with that, those of us who trust Kerry implicitly on defense and security issues. Those of us who are already voting for him.
Swing voters also know what kind of mess we're in right now and they know who caused it, and this works in Kerry's favor - unless he falls into the trap of refusing to clean it up. Why would people trust Kerry to take over as commander in chief during this mess of a war, if he's already disavowed it, already abdicated his responsibility to clean it up and get us out? Then, the natural reaction is to say, let the guy who started it finish it, because this mess has to be cleaned up and that guy Kerry doesn't want anything to do with it.
Yes, the media pundits will go after Kerry regardless, but I believe the question was a trap and the easy answer would have been a potentially fatal mistake. Bush gets to be strong and wrong, so let's hammer on the wrong part.
And, for a final bomb, here's what may have been a fatal mistake: George W Bush saying "I don't think we can win the war on terror." Both candidates got hit with tough questions that boiled down to this: we are where we are, so do you accept responsibility and lead or do you waver?
George W Bush wavered. John Kerry didn't.