Because he, and millions of other people, trusted a man who shouldn’t have been trusted, but he still believes that people should be able to trust the President of the United States.
Let me know when you actually read the article, or even the little bit I quoted a few posts up.
I believe it is you, who is not understanding. Kerry believes the office of the president should be able to back up it’s words with the threat of war. It has NOTHING to do with Iraq. It’s a stand on principle.
OK, lets try this again. I am going to repost the relevant blurb, and bold the even more relevant part. Now hold your horses! Don’t reply until you have read the words and comprehend them, okey-doke?
OK, so you have read that, right?
So my question remains: What motivation would Kerry have had in voting to authorize the use of force given the (assumed in the linked story) known lack of WMD and terrorism connections?
Kerry likes to have things both ways. Okay, he volunteered for service in Vietnam. Served two tours. Won medals. Sounds good to me.
Then as soon as he gets out he turns around and labels all soldiers serving in Vietnam as war criminals. In a demonstration of contempt for his own service, he participates in a protest that includes throwing away medals.
But wait…they weren’t HIS medals. He still has those. Which makes his gesture a hollow one.
So does he think the Vietnam War was a good thing or not? He’s gotten plenty of political capital out of his service record, and has responded angrily when this record was called into question. Now he’s attacking Dick Cheney for his failure to go to Vietname and “become a war criminal.”
Which is it?
Kiz: There’s nothing two faced about Kerry and Vietnam. He clearly thinks the war was wrong, although he didn’t realize that when he volunteered. And there’s no reason he shouldn’t be proud of his military service. Also, he never claimed that ALL servicemen in Vietnam were war criminals. I personally think he overstated the issue (saying it happened on a daily basis), and even he admits that now. No need or reason to exagerate beyond credibilty on your part, though.
How does this not answer your question?:
Because it does not make any sense to me.
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Kerry stated that he would have voted for authorizing the use of force in Iraq, even knowing what we know now.
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We know now that there are no WMD in Iraq.
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Kerry also said:(Before saying he would have voted to back the use of force anyways)
- But he still backs authorization for going to war? To what end? Why would he back authorization to go to war if Kerry knew that Bush ‘misled America’?
Which leaves the following possibilities:
A) Kerry has signed on to PNAC. Yay Kerry!
B) Kerry has been caught lying.
C) Kerry doesn’t think too hard about the stuff he says.
I’m going with a mix of B and C.
Ok, how about this? Kerry voted to authorized the use of force in Iraq so that the office of president would be able to back up it’s words with the threat of war, to paraphrase Hambil.
Let me give you a hint: voting to authorize the use of force is not the same as voting to use force.
Why would the office of President need to issue threatening words to Iraq if it was known that they had no WMD? All that’s left is the ‘drain the swamp’ angle, right?
A. Kerry is on record as having been against the war even before he went.
B. I don’t say he shouldn’t be proud of his service, HE said it. Note his little gesture of throwing away “his” medals.
C. His comments about the war crimes of American soldiers were blistering enough that the VC played them over and over again to POWs as propaganda.
And after all of that he has the audacity to refer to fellow Vietnam vets as his “band of brothers”? To boast of his medals? This is not, from my point of view, a change of heart. It’s a cynical ploy to get votes. And it’s so bloody typical that his followers label Bush and Chaney as draft dodgers while at the same time holding up Clinton as a paragon of leadership.
I’m not an enthusiastic Bush supporter, but Kerry just makes me sick.
John Kerry has always been a very intelligent, very serious, very earnest, very deep-thinking person. About that I have heard little dispute. Therefore, the idea that through his college years this most reflective of men should not have thought much, discussed much and read much about THE burning issue of the time, THE issue that represented a very clear and present threat to his own life, is most unlikely. The idea that he should have sifted through all the data he had gathered in his first-class mind and decided that the war was a good thing is rather unlikely. Is there any other evidence from his college days that he was not a liberal but a conservative?
roger: Well, you didn’t necessarily have to be a conservative to support the war at least in the early days. You have to remember that Vietnam started under Kennedy and expanded under Johnson. And, in the 1968 race, Nixon said, “Those who have been given 4 years and cannot produce peace should not be given another chance” (although obviously he wasn’t advocating unilaterally pulling out of the war).
Kennedy. Now we’re talking war records, now we’re talking boats!
Bringing John Kennedy into the debate at least has the merit of putting into relief the deceit and disingenuousness of characters such as Kerry, Bush and Clinton (W.J.).
“Liberal”, “conservative”. They are words. They are bandied around like confetti, they are chameleon-like, they are largely irrelevant. Especially when self-interest is involved. And it always is.
Good people, you can trust (most of the time) and not good people (you can never trust). That’s the distinction that matters.
Brutus, personally I wouldn’t have given Bush the authority to go to war, because I never believed they had WMD, but I can see why someone who wouldn’t want war could still grant the authority.
You have to take it in context. Even if we know the intelligence that we know now, it was the threat of war that was making Saddam more pliable to weapons inspections. And maybe, just maybe, if Bush had been telling the truth about waiting for the inspectors to find a “smoking gun” before he decided to invade a sovereign country, it could have worked, and we wouldn’t have had to worry about WMD because we would have known better.
Instead, Bush, true to form, lied about about being undecided and attacked anyway.
light strand, I agree with you. Personally, I don’t completely comprehend Kerry’s statement. But, on the other hand, I don’t really understand the hypothetical scenario presented to him either. Since this whole President’s justification for war was based on a combination of bad intelligence, cherry-picked intelligence, and deception, it is not clear how Bush would have presented the case for him to have the authority that he asked for if we knew then what we know now about what the actual truth is.
But, my best guess is that what Kerry means is closest to what you said. This is also in line with what I heard Hillary Clinton say in an interview several months ago. She was adament that she believes strongly that the President needs to have the maximum authority in such situations, so she believed that in principle that if the President asks for such authority it is incumbent upon Congress to provide it. Of course, implicit in this is a certain trust for the President that this one clearly didn’t deserve. And, this is where I personally part company with these Democrats. I think that their mistake was a certain naivety that led them to underestimate just how bad, deceptive, and captured by ideology rather than reason this President and his advisors are. I consider such an inability to recognize the poor character of others to be a character flaw itself but not nearly so much of one as actually having such a poor character.
Color me skeptical. I am willing to believe that you might well have voted for Lieberman. As for “Bradley, or any of a host of others”, I am quite confident that when the Republican attack machine got through with most of them, you would be up here saying “I would have voted for Lieberman, or Kerry, or any of a host of others but Candidate X, I really can’t vote for because…”
In fact, when it looked like Howard Dean was likely going to be the nominee, we did hear much the same thing in regards to him from Republicans (or other conservatives) who don’t like Bush but can’t quite stomach most Democrats either.
If I could be granted one wish, it would be the ability to transport these people to these parallel universes where they could see for themselves how this would happen.