America Will Follow, Not Lead, Under Kerry

They are not unified is the point. They want you to believe there’s this giant unified force, but they are not, ladies and gentlemen. They’ve got a bunch of independent contractors out there that Kerry is going to do his best to try to keep the lid on, and he’s out there now having to distance himself from Dean. But I want to read to you this Chris Matthews question again, because this is the quicksand the Democrats have put themselves in. He asks this again of Richard Holbrooke, who is the former ambassador of the UN for Clinton and the husband of Peter Jennings’ ex-wife, Kati Marton. “We’ve set up a dynamic,” Matthews said. “I’m just going to ask you to check this.”
And Matthews, by the way, is worried. He’s speaking about this as one of them. He says, “We’ve set up a dynamic whereby those who have opposed the action in Iraq whether they be European or American or anywhere else in the world are somehow forced, almost forced on the side of the terrorists in Europe because those terrorists in Europe, assuming they’re Al-Qaeda, are opposed to our involvement in Iraq. How in the world can an opposition argument be made now in this environment? How can you argue against the whole force of the direction of U.S. foreign policy when you’re basically being put the on the side of the terrorists in the argument?”

And that’s the trap that they’ve fallen into. But it’s not new. I have been warning you people, and the Democrats of this since the campaign of 2002. You know, they’ve set themselves up politically so that bad news for America is good news for them. Look, can anybody deny? I’ll give you two instances. When Saddam was captured, was there not panic on the Democrat side? You know damn well there was. And when Madrid blew, do you not think that there was accompanying, “Bush is dead now. Bush’s War on Terror isn’t working now.” There was an undercurrent. Kerry went out of his way not to say anything about it, in that sense.
But let me just ask you, even those of you who are casual observers, do any of you doubt where the Democratic Party, the liberals, the 60s Democrats that run this party today, do you have any doubt where they stand on terrorism? They want to appease the terrorists. They don’t want to confront them. They think they can get along with them. The United Nations is the outpost to make all this magic come true. They are opposed to what we’re doing in Iraq. They don’t want Bush bringing it up. They know it hurts them. Look at the 9/11 ads that Bush ran last week. There was a cacophony of panic and outcry, “How dare he!”
Why? What’s wrong with this? This is a call to action. This is our future. Why? The Democrats know they’re on the wrong side of it. That’s why. They know they’ve done everything they can to undercut this. Their votes have been one thing, but their public pronouncement? Here’s their problem. Their problem is they’ve got this wacko, fringe, lunatic fringe base that if they don’t get to the polls, they’re dead. So they’ve got to go out and say whatever it is that’s going to satisfy these screaming, wide-open mouths demanding to be fed all of this rotgut, but at the same time, when it comes time to vote, they do go in, in enough numbers to give support, but then they act embarrassed of the votes.
Then when they start talking again they start explaining it away, as Kerry does. “Well, you know, I voted for it and I voted against it, voted against it before I voted for it, and I only voted for it because I thought they were going to repeal tax cuts for the rich to pay for it.” Of course the base just eats all this up, but the fact of the matter is, they’re going to need more than their base to win, and the perception is they oppose Iraq. When Holbrooke said here, “Why, we’ve got a policy for Iraq. We’ve got a much better….” What is it? Nobody knows what Kerry’s policy is. People assume that Kerry’s policy is to get out of there. Now, Kerry knows this.

Kerry knows this because he had to go on the record yesterday and say [paraphrasing], “I don’t think we can afford to get out of there now. Bush has bungled this so badly that we can’t afford to leave.” That’s his rationale. Let me see if it’s audio sound bite (muttering) let’s try 2 and 3, here. This is from his speech. This is a speech that didn’t make it. This is the speech that started just after the hotel bombing in Baghdad, so the networks cut out of it. But in the interests, ladies and gentlemen, of full disclosure and the interests of public service and in the interest of fairness, we found a copy of this speech so that you will be able to hear the dulcet tones of the Democratic presidential accident-waiting ?to-happen. Here’s John Kerry, and this is cut 1 from his speech that the networks preempted yesterday.
KERRY: One year ago this week, in an extraordinary display of American military efficiency and might, our soldiers raced across the desert to Baghdad. Ten months ago, George Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and proclaimed mission accomplished.
RUSH: Could you pick it up here?
KERRY: But today we know that the mission is not finished. Hostilities have not ended, and our men and women in uniform fight on almost alone in reality with the target squarely on their backs and their fronts. Every day they face danger and death from suicide bombers, roadside bombers, and now ironically from the very Iraqi police that they are training.
RUSH: Yeah, it’s a war, and nobody said it was going to be easy. So you complain about it; now what are you going to do? This is not unusual in a war like this. This is a noble cause. Can anybody conclude anything other than Kerry disagrees with us? And what he’s doing here also, my friends, is revising Democrat history at the same time, because he wants you to believe that he’s always been for this. They complained about that march across the desert. Every step of the way they complained about it. They complained about it when it began. “It began two months early, began three months early! If we’d have just waited we’d have had inspections!” They complained about it every step of the way. Now Kerry wants you to think because they know how dangerously close they are to being perceived as being on the side of the terrorists, here. Here’s the next sound bite from this. This is where he says Bush misled us.

KERRY: We’re still bogged down in Iraq, and the administration stubbornly holds to failed unilateral policies that drive potential, significant, important, long-standing allies away from us. What we have seen is a steady loss of lives and mounting costs in dollars to the American taxpayer with no end in sight. We were misled about weapons of mass destruction.
RUSH: Oh. Uh-oh.
KERRY: We were misled in very specific terms about the evidence that we were showed within those briefings to the Congress of the United States and we are misled now when the costs of Iraq are not even counted in the president’s budget.
RUSH: So these are the kinds of little reframings and restructuring of history that Kerry can’t get away with. Number 1, he’s putting people to sleep when he speaks. I’m sitting there going, “Could you pick it up a little bit? Where’s the energy? If you really believe this, where’s the passion?” I don’t hear any passion. Where’s the energy? This business about we were deceived and misled about weapons of mass destruction? Everybody was deceived and misled! He wants it to be understood here that Bush misled him and that Bush misled the Democrats. Still can’t be honest about this. So no matter how he positions it, no matter how he tries to say it, he still comes off as being against the effort of the United States of America because he’s against George Bush who leads it. [Interruption]
It’s a good question. I mean, if Kerry is so smart, why didn’t he figure out the intelligence was wrong when he saw it? Why didn’t he look at it? I mean, he voted for it. He believed it, too. Everybody believed this. Madeleine Albright even said recently this week, that she thought he had weapons of mass destruction over there. Everybody was fooled by it. This is what I mean. This is the kind of stuff that’s not fooling anybody. This is the kind of stuff that’s just red meat for the fringe leftist Democrats who are supporting Kerry, but everything he says… I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to read. There are two more bites here, but time is growing short, and I don’t know if we have it, but I do know that he said we can’t pull out now.

We cannot pull out, and now I’m going to tell you about that. The reason he says we can’t pull out now is not because he wants to stay. He said the reason we can’t pull out is because he knows how weak his position is on this, and he’s got to make it look like he’s committed to defeating terrorists. And now he’s got to make it look like he’s got a better plan to do it than Bush does. And it’s one thing to say so, and it’s one thing to have Richard Holbrooke out there saying, “Kerry’s got a great plan.” But can anybody tell me what it is? What is Kerry’s plan, other than going to the United Nations and coming up an international coalition?
Let me ask this. What is it about John Kerry that makes him think that the French and the Germans, who had side deals with Iraq, are going to join him in an effort to wipe out terrorism when they wouldn’t join Bush? That’s not what’s going to go on here, folks. [interruption] Well, but that’s the point. He isn’t agreeing with them. They’re not agreeing with him. He’s agreeing with them. The point is that Kerry is not going to convince Europeans to do it the American way; the Europeans are going to convince Kerry to do it their way, and that’s what he means by cooperation. Dominique de Villepin, Gerhardt Schroeder, Jacques Chirac — their way of fighting terrorism is what the United States will agree to.
That’s what Kerry, that’s his plan, and that’s why he’s talking to all these internationalists. The U.S. will not be leaders under John Kerry or any Democrat that seeks the White House today. They will be followers. We will be appeasers. We will be joining those who believe that it is suicide to try to capture these guys, suicide to go after them, it’s safer to just ignore them and to let them attack somewhere else. But of course all that does is make you vulnerable for future attack again, so keep this in mind. There’s no way that John Kerry just because he’s one of them is going to persuade them. He agrees with them in the first place! I mean, there wouldn’t be any persuasion. John Kerry doesn’t agree with the way we’re doing it. He doesn’t agree with American superpower status. He doesn’t agree with America leading in these fights. He wants to go get along with these clubby friends of his from the European socialist community where they all feel good about themselves and think that the power of their brains and intellect can defeat any foe, simply by virtue of their existence.
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