Well, the ripples of response to John Kerry’s acceptance speech given last night have been profound and powerful. Almost no one thinks he hit a home run, and some even think he struck out. Many pundits from around the blogosphere have chimed in: Instapundit (just keep scrolling) has a good round up of opinion.
I didn’t watch it last night. Frankly, I’m not going to vote for him under any circumstance anyway, so why waste my time? I did, however, read a transcript of the speech, and I do have a couple of observations.

When I came to the Senate, I broke with many in my own party to vote for a balanced budget, because I thought it was the right thing to do. I fought to put a 100,000 cops on the street.

And then I reached across the aisle to work with John McCain, to find the truth about our POW’s and missing in action, and to finally make peace with Vietnam.

What you see above is the only mention of his 19 years in the U.S. Senate in the entire 55 minute speech. In 19 years of serving in the Senate, these are the only three things he did that he thinks recommend him for the job as President. No mention of his votes on security issues, no mention of his votes to raise your taxes, not a peep about his liberal agenda. Of course, seeing as how he has missed over two-thirds of the votes held in the Senate in the past few years, it is possible that he forgot he was in the Senate.

And as President, I will bring back this nation’s time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to.

As Ronald Reagan would say, “Well, there he goes again.” Here Kerry trots out the canard that Bush has always wanted to go to war with Iraq, and simply used 9/11 as an excuse. Most of the mass media, which by the way wants Kerry to win, has already dismissed this as false. Of course, as is par for the course with the Kerry campaign, they offer no proof that this is the case; they simply make the charge and hope the public is stupid enough to believe it.

And when I’m President, America will stop being the only advanced nation in the world which fails to understand that health care is not a privilege for the wealthy, the connected, and the elected – it is a right for all Americans.

Here he goes creating rights where they don’t exist. Yes, health care is important, but ask the people in Europe, who have had free, taxpayer-financed healthcare for years how long they have to wait to make an appointment to see their doctor. Ask them why they all pay thousands of dollars to come to America to have their surgeries performed. Their answers to you will tell you of the failure of socialized medicine.

I will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war. I will have a Vice President who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws. I will have a Secretary of Defense who will listen to the best advice of our military leaders. And I will appoint an Attorney General who actually upholds the Constitution of the United States.

Where to begin? Here, he starts off with the assertion that Bush lied about WMD in the build up to the war. As anyone who has been paying attention to the news the past few weeks knows, this has been disproved by the 9/11 Commission Report, the British investigation of their intelligence prior to the war, Vladimir Putin’s intelligence reports, and a couple of other sources. Next, he raps Cheney because he met with people who actually know about the energy business to discuss the nation’s energy policy. Next, he raps Rumsfeld for supposedly not listening to his military advisors. What he fails to mention is that there were two distinct points of view regarding the Iraqi offensive. Rumsfeld agreed with the side that disagreed with Kerry, so now, in Kerry’s mind, that equates to Rumsfeld not having listened to them. Finally, he knocks Ashcroft as having implemented policies which are unconstitutional. I have yet to have anyone show to me even one policy which violates the Constitution.
All in all, more of the same junk he’s been spewing since the beginning of the campaign. The speech was light on the details of his proposals, and he really said nothing which would let voters know what he would do differently in Iraq. If this is the best he’s got, it isn’t good enough. He’s in for a very disappointing November.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2004 at 1:20 pm by Nick, and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.