John Kerry turned into Margaret Dumont so quickly, I hardly even noticed. But in the New York Post, John Podhoretz has lots of fun with both Kerry’s sophomoric “apartheid” slur against Israel, and his needing a fainting couch from the backlash:
How dare anyone imagine that his reference to Israel as an “apartheid state” in the making might suggest he is anything but entirely supportive of the Jewish state!
Look, he says it wasn’t “helpful” that he said it, and that he wishes he could rewind the tape and not say it.
But you better not think he meant anything by it! You just better not, or else!
“I will not allow my commitment to Israel to be questioned by anyone, particularly for partisan, political purposes,” he said Monday night.
Oooooh. He won’t allow it!
Oh, yeah? Hey, look at me, John Kerry. I’m questioning it.
This is me, right here, right now, questioning it. Right here, in the New York Post.
What are you going to do about it, tough guy? Windsurf over me?
After you’re done, you’d better windsurf over some other people too. Like, maybe, your former Senate colleague Barbara Boxer. Last I looked, she was a Democrat like you.
Still though, Sen. Kerry has one defender left: Brent Budowsky, a former aide to dinosaur liberals such as Lloyd Bentsen and Birch Bayh, who writes an unintentionally camp classic article for The Hill today titled, “Kerry as Churchill.”
No, really! That’s the headline. Click over to read it if you don’t believe me:
Looking across the landscape of world affairs, from sectarian carnage to Middle East instability, from climate change that threatens the earth to a Russian dictator who threatens security in Europe, from the bellicosity of China to nuclear issues with North Korea and Iran, if there is a Winston Churchill of modern times who issues warnings and offers solutions, it is Secretary of State John Kerry.
Since the founding of Israel in 1948, Israel has had no better friend than John Kerry. His aspirations and efforts for Middle East peace might soon be dead, and if they are, historians will long condemn the intransigent and small-minded Israeli and Palestinian leaders who will force young Israelis and Palestinians to pay the price of their pettiness for generations to come.
While commentators grow impatient with Kerry’s Churchillian warnings about the consequences of failure in the Middle East peace process, the world might sadly witness how right Kerry is.
As Vladimir Putin escalates his war against Ukraine, employs lies as an instrument of invasion and subversion, and wages war against the sanctity of sovereignty and borders that has kept the peace in Europe since Hitler fell and the Berlin Wall tumbled, Kerry calls on a timid Europe to demonstrate resolve with the moral force with which Churchill addressed Neville Chamberlain.
It’s hard to tell, but I actually think he’s being serious; it’s not a piss-take, as they say in Mr. Churchill’s land. If that’s the case, then the Mobius Loop-level of leftwing recursion is strong in this one. Let’s unpack the last sentence quoted above, which references Neville Chamberlain. Does Budowsky mean the Neville Chamberlain, whose “Peace In Our Time” refrain, which in retrospect came to define not just the perfidy of an entire interwar generation in Europe, but the start of World War II itself — which Obama unintentionally quoted, Ron Burgundy-style, thanks the clueless speechwriter who loaded it into the equally clueless president’s teleprompter for his second inaugural address?
Not to mention the comparisons of Kerry to Churchill himself, whose bust Obama infamously returned to England to kick off his first term, as a symbol for his loathing of Britain’s colonial period. (Which you know, birthed America, which Kerry and his boss really loathe.) To build on Mark Steyn’s recent post, the Churchill bust was returned to an England that went full-bore PC long before America did, where one can be busted for quoting the words of the man who inspired the Churchill bust.
Just as a reminder, in 2010, Budowsky launched a one-man Draft John Cougar Mellencamp campaign to find someone as fatuous as Al Franken to join him in the US Senate. Why yes, what America needs is a man who told Charlie Rose in 2007 that he wasn’t sure who caused Pearl Harbor, let alone 9/11.
Today, Budowsky has managed to top the piece of fatuous psychobabble that Andrew Sullivan wrote in the summer of 2004, shortly after moving back to the left to oppose Bush’s reelection bid, which concluded, “Kerry may be the right man — and the conservative choice — for a difficult and perilous time.”
Now at last we know Kerry is positively Churchillian in his conservatism. I’ll sleep better at night knowing he’s on the case — and working for the man who in 2008 was declared the second coming of FDR, JFK, MLK, Lincoln, God — and Churchill as well.
The country’s in the best of hands to coin an Insta-phrase — and the best of pundits, as well.
(Via Moe Lane.)
Join the conversation as a VIP Member