Every time I feel a little presumptious about posting an opinion on a blog, I bring up any current column authored by Paul Krugman, Eleanor Clift, Johathan Alter, Maureen Dowd, or Helen Thomas and read at least the first five or six paragraphs. Okay, first two or three for Alter or Thomas….honesty is important.

Hell, if they can take money with a straight face for what they put out, there’s no possible foul in me venturing an opinion for free.

Rick Ballard -

I proposed that Kerry expected to coast for the five weeks after the convention, confident that whatever questions about his Heroic Vietnam Experience ™might be raised would be blasted by the media. All the charges were already “public”, right? The SBFT even had a press conference back in May that was MENTIONED in major papers. Yup, it was already covered.

I think that Kerry is probably a shitty chess player – and almost without question a catastrophically poor poker player…in a straight game. He has been the junior senator from Massachussets (and before that Boy JFK) for so long he’s forgotten that there really are responsibilities in life beyond his ambitions. As a senator he concentrated on placating his progressive liberal moonbat constituency by voting for policies that would have disarmed, blinded, and bankrupted the country. One senator out of a hundred…even four or five at a time…could be as feckless as Kerry for their whole career but still polish a bench in the Senate because larger men stepped up in enough numbers to choose the right paths. In a nation of even moderately engaged and informed voters, he’d never be remotely considered for any higher station.

Kerry’s NEVER paid for a mistake. Not that I can see. His senate record has been defined as being Ted Kennedy’s page. No bills. Nothing but a relentless, bloviating, hollow prescence on the Senate floor, marked by infrequent attendance in committees, for two decades. No executive leadership of committees…unless you count the P.O.W. betrayal. I imagine we’ll be hearing about that, too, but not from Kerry’s campaign..

No, I’m not indulging in hyperbole. If Kerry thinks he’s got a problem with the Swifties, wait until the RNC starts releasing an ad a week from Labor Day until the election highlighting his record in the Senate. He discounted the possibility that a non-public person like O’Neill would be taken seriously because he’s wired to accept that what media declines to cover isn’t important.

He hasn’t run for office motivated to serve. He’s run by deciding which skids to grease in order to get what he wants. And that in a tiny little liberal state with monolithic machine politics.

The Democrats have no one to blame for what has happened to this candidacy but themselves. I guess they forgot there are rules, too; their apoplectic intent to remove Bush from office has overwhelmed any chance they might look at themselves for a minute and honestly assess what their problem is. Problems are, I should say.

Here’s a freebie for them:

A national party cannot survive the leadership and manipulation of its constituency at the hands of individuals starkly incapable of assuming the responsibilities concommitant with the powers they seek. It just doesn’t work. Whatever the good intentions of the New Deal and subsequent liberal social policies , they have in the end led directly to the practice of vote managing of dependency demographics, class warfare, and have undoubtedly extended the existence of institutionalized racism to the present time.

America is not a government taking care of people. It is three hundred million citizens pursuing their hopes and dreams with the prospect of tyranny only a thin sheet of parchment away. I don’t want to see anything even approaching a single-party system in this country, but the current roster of people at the top of the Democratic party appear more a threat than a loyal opposition. Democrats better find themselves some more Zell Millers.