John Kerry's Daddy

No, not George W. Bush, who is going to kick Kerry's butt on Tuesday.

John Kerry's REAL daddy.

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Vin Suprynowicz writes about the life and philosophy of Richard Kerry, whose membership in the Achesonian pro-appeasement wing of the State Department was well known as far back as the days of Harry Truman. He became involved in the internationalist movement in the 1950s, wrote a book opposing the Vietnam War as early as 1965, and was still criticizing the anti-Communist ideology of the Dulles brothers (and every administration between Eisenhower and Bush 41) in a book published in 1990, the year AFTER the Berlin Wall fell.

A lot of folks have moaned that the current presidential campaign has us "re-fighting the war in Vietnam." It goes deeper than that. This campaign, in many ways, is a replay of the isolationist debate of the 1930s, as revived in the "Better Red Than Dead" leftism of the 1950s.

President Bush believes the way to defeat Islamic terrorism is pretty much the way we defeated first Hitler and Tojo -- and then Russian communism. Use a full-court press; take the war to them on their own turf.

But John Kerry doesn't see the need to fight a war at all. That's what all this "nuance" business is about. It's all a misunderstanding, you see, based on American "ethnocentrism" -- on the notion that America is somehow "exceptional," that we can or should set some kind of shining example of freedom to the other cultures in the world.

That's all wrong, apparently. It represents an oversimplified "either/or" dualism, when what we need to do instead is embrace "a more sophisticated relativism."

Whether it be the communists murdering millions in pursuit of the lunatic collectivist vision of a couple of German crackpots, or Islamic mullahs beating women who go out in public with their arms uncovered and executing college professors who theorize that Mohammed might once have shaved his armpits -- and clownishly blowing up our occasional skyscraper -- we have to get over this "us vs. them" nonsense. The answer is to consult, to negotiate, to reach a compromise.

With Joe Stalin. With Mao Tse-Tung. With Pol Pot. With Osama bin Laden.

Branding these people "communists" or "terrorists" or "mass murderers" is "just name-calling," see. No one culture is superior to any other. And these guys are reasonable; they'll compromise. Maybe if we just offer them Czechoslovakia. ...

Yep -- that's the choice we face on Tuesday. The will for victory over our enemies, or the repudiation of American foreign policy since WWII and its replacement with a policy of negotiation in the face of murderous evil.