Okay, I’m finally going to make a long entry. And I’m going to leave comments on. If someone who is among the backers of Dubya, could you please explain how the following points from Hugh Hewitt mean that John Kerry is a bad man?

• NATIONAL SECURITY. … the war on terror is “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation,” Kerry has fundamentally misunderstood threats to national security and the best means to defend the United States against them.
  – Um, isn’t that exactly what we need to do? Parse the intelligence coming in and identify the threats that terrorists may pose?

• MULTILATERAL MAN. … a fully-formed U.N. man, for whom the opposition of the U.N. to any proposed American initiative would mean at least temporary and perhaps permanent paralysis.
  – Would we be in this Iraq mess if we’d have listened to the U.N.?

• DEFENSE RECORD. As a senator, John Kerry has voted against the full funding of most major weapons systems of the past two decades, including the MX missile, the Patriot inteceptor, and missile defense deployment.
  – Sorry, maybe he didn’t want to hand billions or trillions over to the politically well connected defense contractors and the mess that was/is Star Wars.

• THE L-WORD. “… his ratings from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action have always hovered in the 90%-to-95% range.”
  – So, he’s a Democrat? Imagine that, a liberal Democrat running for the Democratic nomination for President?

• GAY MARRIAGE. Kerry was one of only 14 senators to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal law, signed by Bill Clinton, that obstructs the automatic extension of Kerry’s home state’s embrace of gay marriage.
  – Um, so the religous right isn’t going to vote for a liberal Democrat anyway, what’s the point?

• ABORTION. Kerry has repeatedly voted against the federal law banning partial birth abortions.
  – This one is just assinine, see above.

• MASSACHUSETTS. Kerry is a stand-in for Senator Edward Kennedy, the latest in a long list of failed Massachusetts liberals who wanted to be president–a list that includes Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, and of course, Teddy himself. A vote for Kerry is, in effect, a vote for Kennedy, as well as the East-coast elitism that has never successfully governed the country . . . or understood the world as other than a very contentious faculty meeting that can be calmed with the judicious application of soothing words and the distribution of small perks.
  – Um, I seem to remember this one ‘Massachusetts liberal’ who GOT to be president, and he was even a Kennedy. Didn’t he do some pretty important things?

• ARROGANCE. Kerry’s personal arrogance is legendary, and his nickname–“Live Shot Kerry”–conveys that his arrogance is without even the mediating aristocratic virtue of reserve.
  – Ooh, he’s got a nickname? I’ll bet even Dubya had a few good ones while he was in college. Who gives a damn about nicknames?

• KYOTO. John Kerry’s attachment to the Kyoto Protocol is complete and unshaken, despite the overwhelming rejection of the framework and its economy-crippling provisions by the public and most elected officials–including a large majority of Kerry’s Senate colleagues.
  – Lots of other countrys seem to think Kyoto is a good thing, why are we so against it?

• FLIP-FLOPS. Kerry’s indecision combines with his well-documented flip-flops to make him the Hamlet of the Senate–exactly the opposite of the war-time leadership we need.
  – And Dubya’s never made one of these?

• JUDGMENT. Kerry has equated the president’s service in the National Guard with avoiding the draft by skipping to Canada.
  – Dubya’s magically jumping to the top of a waiting list to get into a so-called ‘champagne unit’, scoring the bare minimum to qualify as a pilot, learning on a plane that was being phased out, etc and Kerry’s volunteering to go to Vietnam compare how? Remember, the National Guard used to mean that you stayed in the US and guarded this country, not that you got called up and shipped off to fight in another country.

• DEATH PENALTY. As recently as 1996, Kerry publicly opposed the death penalty for terrorists. Now he says he supports it.
  – Let see, 1996? Pre 9/11, post 1993 WTC bombing. Can’t we agree the world was a different place then? And as recently as 1983 Donald Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam Hussein.

• IRAQ. John Kerry voted against the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait. Had Kerry had his way, Saddam would still be on his throne, sitting atop Kuwait’s oil, warehouses full of chemical and biological weapons, and, in all likelihood, nuclear weapons.
  – Okay, one point worth discussing. But, who else voted for or against that resolution? (The House approved the resolution on January 12, 1991 by a vote of 250-183. The Senate approved it by a vote of 52-47.)

• PERSONALITY. Kerry is without question the dullest, most self-absorbed, and most-awful-to-listen-to candidate in modern times.
  – As opposed to Dubya and Dick, and the rest of the chickenhawk neo-cons, who just ooze ‘smooth and well prepared’? Give me a break.

Who wants to try to explain to me how those are bad things worth attacking a candidate for? Comments are open, feel free.