Strength and wisdom are not opposing values

There’s something a little bit askew about Clinton giving a speech for Kerry. The disparity between the two would have been a million times more obvious had the two appeared on the same platform, which will never happen, because Kerry is too afraid that the newspaper captions would all be: "Former President Bill Clinton (left) and some guy." Clinton was able to insult Bush’s intelligence in a way Bush will need to have explained to him: "Strength and wisdom are not opposing values." And he was able to come out as both a Vietnam draft avoider, and as a member of the non-non-rich [if you don’t get the reference, click here], which Kerry and Bush are afraid to do: "When I was in office, the Republicans were pretty mean to me. When I left and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them."

Do Bostonians actually like their town being called Beantown?

Juan Cole says much of what I was going to about the way the Iraq war is being treated at the Dem convention, which is that it is being mostly ignored. You’d think Bush’s biggest failures were not going to Vietnam, and stealing the 2000 election. The D bosses made sure that no resolution against the war even came to a vote--which is actually fine, I suppose, ‘cause who really cares what the opinion of the delegates is? But then they issued a fatwa against any significant criticism of the way the war was conducted, much less discussion of whether it should have been conducted at all. Juan Cole: "The attack on Bush is not that he went to war against Iraq. It is that he did so virtually unilaterally, ‘walking away from our allies.’"  Me: which is the least criticism of the war you can have and still be criticizing the war, which is obviously exactly why that line was chosen. It still suggests that the US should, somehow, have talked Germany, France, etc into joining our splendid little war, and fails to acknowledge that they were pretty much correct not to get involved, and neither should we.