Wild-goose hunting for a makeover

Extreme makeover: John Kerry a `guy’s guy’. Senator’s hunting trip latest salvo in battle for voters. Campaign tries to emulate Bush’s macho persona

Note to Kerry campaign: Shooting one goose isn’t going to do it. Shooting a whole gaggle won’t, either. Especially if you get the reporters annoyed enough.

Meanwhile, I can’t wait to see my husband’s reaction to the latest spin on Teresa: “She’s a very subtle cross between Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren” (nothing subtle about Sophia and La Lollo, methinks). I expect that his reaction, after he stops laughing, will be more like Christopher Buckley’s, “I think Teresa Heinz would be by far the only thing to enjoy during what I suspect will be four dreary years of the human tree“, but I’ll wait until he gets home this evening.

Yesterday Thomas Sowell took a good look at the the candidates. Like Sowell, I’ve had plenty of “plans” that have had to been changed due to hard reality. Sowell looks at the current race:

Back then, we knew that the job was to win the war, not to score political points over it. We didn’t even have these debatable “debates” of today. The idea of choosing a wartime leader on the basis of quick-reaction sound bites would never have occurred to anyone.

Sound bites are usually not very sound. Those who have spent their whole political careers talking may be very glib, but what have they actually done? It is amazing how long that question has been kept off the table by the Beltway media, who are on record as being for Senator Kerry by 12 to one.

Neither Senator Kerry nor Senator Edwards has administered anything. Nor have they created a single piece of major legislation in their combined two dozen years in the Senate. Both have incredible records of absenteeism at meetings of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

But they talk a great game. And they have “plans.”

What they also have is utter irresponsibility.

. . . Kerry and Edwards remain viable candidates only because their rhetoric has obscured their reality — and because too many in the media seem reluctant to bring out the facts against candidates who share the media’s vision of the world.

Charles Krauthammer looks at the foreign policy connotations,

He [Kerry] really does want to end America’s isolation. And he has an idea how to do it. For understandable reasons, however, he will not explain how on the eve of an election.

Think about it: What do the Europeans and the Arab states endlessly rail about in the Middle East? What (outside of Iraq) is the area of most friction with U.S. policy? What single issue most isolates America from the overwhelming majority of countries at the United Nations?

The answer is obvious: Israel.

In what currency, therefore, would we pay the rest of the world in exchange for their support in places such as Iraq? The answer is obvious: giving in to them on Israel

Kerry has said that the United States should supply Iran with nuclear fuel. Iran’s Mullahs have sworn death to Israel. Even Kerry’s top Iranian fund-raiser, Hassan Nemazee (who’s raised over $500,000 for the Kerry presidential campaign) has agreed that the current Iranian government is a terror-exporting regime. Going by the facts, Dr. Krauthammer’s analysis is spot-on. Additionally, as William Kristol has said, “His [Kerry’s] near obsession with gaining the approval of the U.N., and for that matter of France and Germany, for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy would make him the riskiest commander in chief of any presidential candidate since George McGovern–and surely makes Kerry unsuitable to govern in a post-9/11 world.”

On the economy, today Dr. Sowell examines the ‘Tax cuts for the rich!’ canard. Sowell recognizes the fact that “Income is not wealth and income taxes do not apply to wealth,” something painfully obvious to people who live in high-expense, high-tax states like NJ.

Now, if the Kerry campaign tried a makeover that took that into consideration, actually took a substantive look at the war, and dared to verbalize the foreign policy implications, then we’d be talking makeover.