Giggin' John Kerry:
A few weeks ago, the Rude Pundit offered John Kerry advice on how to handle the question of how he would have voted on the Iraq resolution ifheknewthenwhatheknowsnow. Unfortunately, Kerry gave the worst possible answer, an answer so bad that, even if it's true, sounds so blatantly political, that he voted for a resolution that gave Bush "the right authority to have" so Bush could go to war on his whim. Standing at the Grand Canyon, Kerry then "challenged" Bush on a few real, substantive issues dealing with the war, but the damage was done. The right wing media had all it needed to start screaming that Kerry would have gone to war, so he agrees with Bush, blah, blah, blah. Kerry apologists were stuck in the bent over positions of either trying to re-focus the question or trying to explain/re-state that Kerry meant he would have voted "yes" for the resolution to give a President the power but he would not have gone to war, which was a fucked-up way to answer, since he was playing Senator and President. Yes, like a good frog gigger, the Bush campaign shined the flashlight in Kerry's eyes and Kerry froze while Bush speared him with the gig. Now there's nothin' left to do but laugh like little boys at how the frog dances on the gig.

The story's already out there, no matter what Kerry actually said, he "agrees it was the right decision to go into Iraq." Bush is smiling at this like a group of mongoloids discovering it's pudding day at the home. It takes focus away from the fucked-up economic news. And it allows that smug fucker to say things like, "After months of questioning my motives and my credibility, Senator Kerry agrees with me that, even though we have not found the stockpile of weapons we all believe were there, knowing everything we know today, he would have voted to go into Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power." The spin, baby, is like the hammer thwack to the back of the frog's head to stop that pathetic fucker from squirming. (And goddamn Bush a little extra for the anti-intellectualism of saying that Kerry has found "a new nuance" - once again deriding the act of engaged thinking.)

Fuck and motherfuck, there was such an easy answer to the President, one that would have forced Bush to crawfish his way out of the whole question. Again, it's so simple that it's sublime. Follow the President's logic. He's making all kinds of idiotic "what-if" assumptions. (Really, and c'mon, the whole question is like asking, "Would you have fucked that hot-ass dude from the bar if you knew he had herpes?" The circumstances were different then: you were drunk, it was close to last call, and, diseased or not, the guy was cut.) So Kerry was asked what he would have done ifheknewthenwhatheknowsnow, that Saddam had no WMDs, no al-Qaeda ties. But here's the deal: if the President wants you to time travel with your current knowledge, take it all, in its totality. It ain't only a "what-if" on Saddam - it's a "what-if" on Bush, too. If you knew then that at this point, August 2004, that there were no WMDs, no al-Qaeda ties, and that it would cost over a hundred billion dollars and that the Pentagon had no plan for dealing with significant indigenous resistance and that the White House condoned the torture of prisoners and that we'd be looking at breaking the 1000 mark on American soldier deaths, then of course you would not have voted to give Bush the power to, in your own words, fuck things up so badly. And if you put it that way, who could disagree with you?

It's a simple, straightforward, vivid answer that takes the question and turns it back on the idiots asking it. It makes the question about trusting Bush as a leader. It makes the voters have to deal with the reality of the war instead of the fantasy of what might have been.