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David Rodeback's Blog

Thursday, July 29, 2004

Democratic National Convention

John Kerry gave his acceptance speech tonight, and as performances go, it wasn't bad. If he can get the same speech writer(s) to craft all his answers in the presidential debates, he may have a chance. God, faith, country, apple pie, motherhood, telling the truth, family values, tax cuts . . . Of course, if his party actually believed he was serious about a lot of what he said, he'd have to change parties. The modern Democrat strategy is to say anything, absolutely anything (except, so far, anything opposed to abortion), in order to get elected. Once you have power, you can do what you want; nothing you said before matters.

A point of curiosity: Will Kerry now discretely have to throw some sops to the Left, just to remind them that he was really kidding about most of that stuff he said tonight? Or do they know the drill well enough not to get nervous when the most liberal Democrat in the Senate talks like a conservative for most of an hour on national television?

If we really took him seriously, we'd expect him to trot right out and sign up as a sponsor for that resolution proposing the constitutional amendment to prohibit burning the flag.

Meanwhile, does anyone in the Democratic Party actually read the papers? Again tonight there was this tiresome talk of abandoning our allies and acting alone, an obvious reference to Iraq. What are the dozens of nations who are acting with us, if not our allies? What are Great Britain and Australia, if not our best, closest allies? Just because the French, Germans, and Russians went wobbly when it mattered doesn't mean we acted alone or abandoned our allies. I wonder what a British focus group would say of the repetitive insistence that, when their nation is with us, the United States acts alone.

There were also thinly veiled accusations that the President lied to the world about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Niger, despite the fact that in recent weeks there have been numerous confirmations - even from the French intelligence agency - that Iraq really was trying to buy uranium in Niger.

Tonight's speech also featured several instances of Kerryspeak, coming down on mutually contradictory sides of issues, and a certain measure of Orwellian use of words in ways opposite their actual meaning. But we're used to that, and we're really not supposed to notice, anyway.

Copyright 2004 by David Rodeback.
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