HOW MANY TIMES WILL EDWARDS SAY "HALLIBURTON" TONIGHT?

I've seen some pretty bad managers during my career, but Bush takes the cake and he's still being considered for an extension. What does that say about the American People?

My impression actually is that people on both sides of the presidential divide are despondent about their candidate, although I am really only expert about Democrats. I am the editor in chief of a (neo) liberal weekly and live in Cambridge, Mass., where I watched last week's debate with (not neo) liberal friends. Almost no one among such supporters of John Kerry really likes him, it seems, and no one especially respects him either. But they are panicked that he will lose.

Which is why Mr. Kerry's answer to Jim Lehrer's first question last Thursday -- "Do you think you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the U.S.?" -- was such a downer.

There seems to be some personal anxiety underlying almost everything Mr. Kerry thinks about U.S. foreign policy. He craves the approval of Europeans, as if he were some American arriviste right out of a Henry James novel. (Teresa is a different kind of James character.) Early on in the campaign, he claimed that he had met with foreign leaders and they had told him they preferred him to Bush -- as if that were a bona fide to American voters. I can't count how many times I've heard Kerry people -- not Kerry -- tell me that the Germans and the French, the Swedes and all of the Arabs dislike Bush and want Kerry to win. So what! Or, on the other hand, maybe it is really quite telling that the Arabs so much prefer Kerry.

In any case, he is obsessed with the United Nations and our "alliances." In something like 40 minutes of his having the microphone in the debate, Sen. Kerry alluded to the U.N., alliances, allies, and summits fully 27 separate times, about one reference to every minute-and-a-third, always charging President Bush with ignoring them. This means something, and what it means first of all is that Sen. Kerry has confidence that the U.N. (nine mentions) is still a force for good in the world. But the U.N. was designed to protect the territorial integrity of established states, to protect Poland, so to speak, from Germany or Indonesia from the Netherlands. The most disastrous wars now being waged, however, are the near-genocides within established borders, like the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and at this very moment in the Sudan.


As the U.N. did nothing when Saddam Hussein was murdering Iraq's Kurds and Shiites in the hundreds of thousands, it has been less than passive in these cases, passing vaguely reproachful resolutions reluctantly and, in any case, without effect. (The first precedent for these refusals of responsibility was the U.N.'s siding with Nigeria against the Ibos of Biafra 45 years ago, and now you have Nigeria, a monument to brutality, corruption and religious violence, also the main power in the African Union, which is put forward as the apt gendarmerie for Darfur.) The U.N.'s very structure makes it hostage to the five permanent members of the Security Council and to their particular, often pecuniary, interests. (France holds one of these post-World War II "big power" seats only because de Gaulle persuaded Churchill and FDR to pretend that the French actually fought the Nazis. This is a seat that would more aptly be filled by India.) The very essence of the international system is very different from what it once was, and Sen. Kerry cannot or will not see it.


Mr. Kerry claimed in the debate that, had the U.S. gone back to the Security Council on Iraq yet again (and, presumably, again), our "allies" would have finally supported the war in Iraq. He is smoking weed. Our "allies," in this case Russia and France, were actually functional allies, really partners of the Baathist regime in Baghdad, and these two states had been mobilizing to have sanctions lifted from Saddam which they were about to succeed in doing. President Bush did not have the wit to point this out. It is true, nonetheless. And the U.N., somehow seen as a potential arbiter in Iraq, does not have the courage of well . . . those two young Italian pacifist women who were held hostage by political gangsters even though they were against the American presence. When U.N. headquarters was bombed, Kofi Annan immediately pulled his staff out and they haven't returned. He'll put them back when they are perfectly safe, which is to say when they are not needed.

There is a stifling formalism to Sen. Kerry's conception about how one does diplomacy. He likes summits (three mentions), as if they are not commonly mere stage sets for grandstanding. He also likes special envoys -- James Baker and Jimmy Carter in particular -- as if they were what was needed to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, although he did not mention this hackneyed and failed fixative on Thursday night, failed not only in the Holy Land but in Ireland, too.

Sen. Kerry is allergic to force, as we all should be, at least somewhat. [Note: Mr. Kerry has no problem with the use of force - as long as we only use it against opponents so small and powerless that victory is assured. Mr. Kerry takes Powell Doctrine to the illogical extreme. He supports use of military force to prop up a tin-pan dictator in Haiti but opposes it to remove a sadistic and brutal one in Iraq] But there are times when force is necessary, even unilateral force or force deployed by a small cohort of nations. Sen. Kerry seemed to praise Bush père for the limits he put on the ambitions of the 1991 Gulf War, that it did not target Saddam. But Sen. Kerry -- it is important to recall -- voted even against that war although it was backed by a far larger coalition of countries, many Arab states included.


Still, Sen. Kerry promises that, if he is elected, he will be able to bring both more countries and the U.N. itself into Iraq. And what would be their motivation? To let American divisions out? This is a fantasy, like his fantasy that his found allies would also put up money for the enterprise they and he have railed against.

larry
If they are looking for someone with the same attributes as Bush. They might like a wax dummy.

Larry434
If you think pouting and making faces and showing his annoyance is animated I agree with you. Bush was animated.

Larry, It's very difficult to undo lifelong traits unless somebody hypnotizes him first.

Larry434
If you think pouting and making faces and showing his annoyance is animated I agree with you. Bush was animated.

Bush explains his facial animation.

"Last week in our debate he once again came down firmly on every side of the Iraq war.

He stated that Saddam Hussein was a threat, and that America had no business removing that threat.

Sen. Kerry said our soldiers and Marines are not fighting for a mistake, but also called the liberation of Iraq a "colossal error."

He said we need to do more to train Iraqis, but he also said we shouldn't be spending so much money over there.

He said he wants to hold a summit meeting--so he can invite other countries to join what he calls "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time."

He said terrorists are pouring across the Iraqi border, but also said that fighting those terrorists is a diversion from the war on terror.

You hear all that, and you can understand why somebody would make a face."