Debate Followup
Posted By Russ Emerson on October 1, 2004 at 12:49 am
And the winner is…. Kerry on style, Bush on substance.
But the real winner will be determined by who makes best use of all the soundbites from the debate. In that regard Bush will win, and win big.
Kerry provided such a huge and seemingly never-ending stream of fodder for pro-Bush advertisements that the hard part for the Bush campaign will be figuring out which specific Kerry utterances will be best to use.
I’d go with the “global test” business.
And now I’m off to bed.
I think the other big kerry flub was on Iran.
Kerry still wants to give the Mullahs nuclear fuel. That strategy is the same strategy that failed with North Korea.
As part of a bi-lateral deal negotiated by the Clinton administration, the US gave North Korea two light water reactors in exchange for assurances that it would not pursue nuclear weapons. The North Koreans cheated.
Here’s what Kerry said in the debate last night:
I think the United States should have offered the opportunity to provide the nuclear fuel, test them, see whether or not they were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes. If they weren’t willing to work a deal, then we could have put sanctions together. The president did nothing.
Only a credulous candidate would believe that an energy-rich country needs nuclear reactors for peaceful persons. Only a morally-impaired candidate would think that a country led by Islamic fanatics is interested in the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Only a suicidal candidate would give nuclear fuel to a country that has already threatened Israel with nuclear holocaust. But Senator Kerry thinks we should offer them fuel to see whether or not they’ll use it peaceful purposes. I guess that makes him credulous, morally-impaired and suicidal.
The “Moolahs” (was that a Bush jibe or flub?) will build their nuclear arsenal in bunkers deep underground yet Kerry wants to deprive the US of the sole means of destroying those bunkers. He said:
Right now the president is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The United States is pursuing a new set of nuclear weapons. It doesn’t make sense.
You talk about mixed messages. We’re telling other people, “You can’t have nuclear weapons,” but we’re pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using.
Kerry still doesn’t understand that there is a difference between free democratic countries retaining nuclear weapons for defense and rogue regimes seeking to acquire nuclear weapons for offense. That proves he is a credulous, morally-impaired, and suicidal candidate.
I agree with both Russ and pat.
Furthermore, from a strategic standpoint, considering the poll numbers lately, anything short of a Kerry slam dunk in both style and substance is bad news for the Democrats.