Michael Hussey at Pushing Rope had a good eye for dialogue if not for pictures. In a post about Erik Smith and Vince Morris joining JK’s team, he noted this:

Kerry has also hired former reporter Vince Morris as his communications director. This will have conservatives screaming media bias, but I still find it funny. Besides, you guys have Fox News and talk radio locked up.

A few minutes earlier, Karl Rove had tried to float the notion that “It was one of the president’s better debate performances and one of Kerry’s worst.” But, in sharp contrast to other occasions, he couldn’t make it fly. As Lizza noted “Vince Morris of The New York Post stares at Rove and asks, “Can you say that with a straight face?”

Heh.

Yeah, we thought JK rocked in the debates too!

In a terrific summary of the SFRC hearing with Sec. Rice, Beachmom wrote a dailykos diary about some of the senators who stepped up to the plate with probing questions. She included a number of excerpts and commentary in her own unique voice. In the portion about JK’s questioning, she wrote:

Oh, Senator, we love it when you start rattling off Arabic names as if you’re talking about Mr. Smith down the street. But we shouldn’t get Ms. Rice too distracted, listening to a real thinker as opposed to that joker boss of hers, so you might want to tone that down in the future.

RICE: I agree…

KERRY: The president didn’t address it.

RICE: No, the president did address it. He talked about the need for the national oil law. And…

KERRY: The need for it, but now how it’s going to happen. And why do we have to wait three years to have that?

RICE: We are very much—well, because it’s actually a very difficult thing, Senator ….

Where have we heard that before? “It’s hard work”, you know, doing the job of the president. Or rather, maybe nobody feels like doing the work, the real diplomatic work, and what is hard work is being stuck in a room debating Senator Kerry, what with all those facts, insights, policy knowledge, and oh, the Arabic names he speaks so fluently, and no right wing noise machine to edit out his brilliance.

That was so sweet, MSNBC put it out in the form of a video called “Kerry spars with Rice”. Well done, Senator. Also, scroll down, and you will find the Hagel Q & A there, too.

We thought it was pretty good too, as was Chuck Hagel’s Q&A with Sec. Rice. Thanks for highlighting our senators on the SFRC at work, beachmom. If you haven’t read up on the SFRC hearing with Sec. Rice, this is a good place to start.   <!-more-> An Australian blogger, D W Griffith, has a lengthy analysis of what kind of response should be made towards militant Islam and he comes to the conclusion that JK had it right in 2002.

Back in 2002, then aspiring US presidential candidate John Kerry began arguing that “the war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation”.

To my ear back then, this sounded like one of Kerry’s more thoughtful contributions. In the struggle against terrors of various sorts over many years, police-style actions of all sorts have usually trumped conventional military force. A series of 20th-century conflicts, not least Vietnam, demonstrates that armoured brigades or infantry platoons do their best work fighting conventional battles. They cannot successfully chase down loose-knit, decentralised networks of militants. Once militants decide to avoid fighting in the open, there are few hard targets for cruise missiles to pick out. Human targets prove even tougher to identify. Most targets are surrounded by civilians who do not react well to seeing Hellfires flying through their neighbours’ windows. You have to convince civilian populations in downtown Islamabad and Mogadishu to turn militants in – a task for which Private John Kryswicki from Duluth, Michigan is almost uniquely ill-equipped. So emphasising intelligence-gathering and law enforcement – “police work”, if you like – sounded the sensible option.

[...]

It is now popular to disparage John Kerry, but it seems to me that back in 2002 he got the “war on terror” exactly right. Here’s a fuller 2002 quote, taken from, of all places, the US Republican Party Web site:

I think all of us need to focus on is the fact that the rhetoric of this war is overblown in some ways and not focused properly in others. This is not a war as we have known it. This is not a war in which there’s a front-line or the troops are going out every day on control. This is fundamentally an intelligence operation and the law enforcement operation and a diplomatic operation. On all three fronts, we have not been doing adequately.

Kerry has first-hand experience of this issue: he was among US officers arguing for counterinsurgency tactics while on duty in Vietnam. And in 2002, he was right. Our rhetoric is part of the problem. “The war on terror” is one of the silliest political phrases of recent years. Once you frame the fight against terror as a war, you almost automatically start marching down the path most likely to bring failure. You deploy troops and air support. You shoot missiles and bullets at targets. You alienate populations. You guarantee that for every terrorist and militant you kill, two more will spring up to take their place.

It’s time to end the “war” on terror, in order to win the fight.

This is not necessarily an argument for Australia or the US to withdraw immediately from Iraq: after three years of foolishness there, we have responsibilities to discharge. It is, however, an argument for a change of approach, of emphasis, of rhetoric. The formula for success against militant Islam over the next decade involves more policing and less soldiering, more investigation and less shooting…

If you’re intrigued by his reasoning then I encourage you to go read the whole post.

  Happened to see this post and comment exchange at Think Progress and thought it was an interesting take on why 2 veterans of the Vietnam war view Iraq so differently. Think Progress :

STRAIGHT TALK:

“If you get involved in a major ground war in the Saudi desert, I think support will erode significantly. Nor should it be supported. We cannot even contemplate, in my view, trading American blood for Iraqi blood.” — Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), New York Times, 8/19/90.

Jay Randal made this comment on the thread:

Kerry Versus McCain On Iraq War

The Vietnam War fiasco propelled 2 veterans of that conflict to get elected to the Senate, and both desiring the presidency, but their experiences in Vietnam were different in that John Kerry learned that Vietnam was a mistake and John McCain believed it was justified.

John Kerry witnessed the horrors of warfare up close being an officer on a swift-boat, but John McCain saw it from the air as a Navy pilot and as a prisoner of war.

Kerry realized that the war was pointless to continue fighting it, but McCain saw its ending as betrayal of everything he suffered at the hands of NVA guards.

The Iraq War is another fiasco and huge dire mistake, so Kerry realizes that reality, but McCain refuses to acknowledge that and wants the war to be escalated.

President Bush lied to the American public to occupy Iraq, just like President Johnson lied to wage war in Vietnam, so the Iraq debacle must end like Vietnam.

Kerry must demand its end and McCain must wake-up!

I didn’t know that Sen. McCain drawn such a clear line in the sand in 1990.

Taylor Marsh takes Ryan Lizza to school over his piece in the New York Times about “The Invasion of the Alpha Male Democrat” (subscription-only)

As for John Kerry, Lizza obviously didn’t pay too close attention to the post 2004 election years, because Kerry learned his lesson and has been kicking collective ass since that point in time, regardless of the botched joke pr debacle.

Honestly, “Live by the Macho Dem creed, die by it” may be the dumbest thing ever written to analyze the current state of the Democratic Party.

You said it, Taylor.

Firespirit on DU lays out a case for JK to run again and makes some interesting points along the way.

The last two years have been horrific. Two terrible tragedies have hit the nation, both of which were avoidable and would have been avoided if not for the great mistake of November 2, 2004. The tragedy in Iraq is staggering—not just the 3,000+ American dead, but the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who were killed, the thousands of soldiers who were wounded, the tens of thousands who experienced psychological trauma, and their loved ones.

Just as one example, Army Specialist Alyssa Peterson, one of the first who died in the war, was assigned to a facility to interrogate and probably torture prisoners of war. She died on Sept. 15, 2003, as a result of a “non-combat weapons discharge,” military jargon often used to describe a suicide. If that is in fact what happened to her - if she took her own life because the sights and sounds in that interrogation facility were too much for her to cope with - what does it say about the other soldiers who were also ordered to commit acts against their own human nature?

There are hundreds of Alyssa Petersons out there. Although the election was too late for her, how many of them would not have experienced what they did if the war had been stopped in 2005 under a President Kerry?

The soul-wrenching tragedy of Hurricane Katrina continues to this day. 2,000 people lost their lives. A booming region lost its vitality. New Orleans lost over half its population. Entire neighborhoods were abandoned to rot. A landfalling hurricane will almost inevitably have a death toll and a damage toll, but how much of this had to happen? How many people died in the storm itself because of inadequate transportation out of the city, or in the horrific aftermath because help arrived too late and too throttled by bureaucracy and low funds? How many lost all their worldly goods because no one was there to fight for them?

[...]

The damage that has been done to the American psyche is another great tragedy of the Bush administration. The administration has cynically used the threat of terrorism to terrorize America itself, and to lay waste to the institutions of democracy that we have cherished since our beginning as a nation. Americans in general do not fall for it anymore, but the damage has been done. We have been conditioned into cynicism about all who work in politics. We have come to see other Americans as the enemy. We are no longer surprised when Bush says he can read our mail without a warrant; we’re just surprised that he bothered to tell anyone about it. We are not surprised when another piece of information comes out about the rottenness and corruption of someone in a high office; we just wonder what has not been uncovered yet.

[..]

Yes, America - a thin majority of Americans - made a big mistake in 2004. But the important thing is that they know it. They know it was their mistake, too, not John Kerry’s.

 

Lots of people took note of the passing of JK’s “Duke Cunningham” bill which we wrote about earlier. Now with the passage of the Senate Ethics bill on Thursday, it is one step closer to being law.

Pamela Leavey at The Democratic Daily has a very complete post on this with links to the language of the amendment and details on who voted which way.

Crooks & Liars cheered the passage with this “snarkily delicious” comment:

Honestly, the name, the “Duke Cunningham Act”, while snarkily delicious, is so limiting. Given all the exalted members of the 109th Congress that have left their seat in disgrace, shall we redub it the “Cunningham/Ney/Delay Act”?

Anyone else I’m forgetting?

Iggy at The Nattering Nabob issued a short and sweet “Thank you, Senator Kerry”.

From the Dump Dolittle blog, came a similarly short and sweet note: “Kudos to Senator Kerry”.

DownWithTyranny noted the passage with a longer post about how “It has rankled me and it has rankled a lot of other taxpayers that even congressmen who have been convicted of using their offices to criminally enrich themselves are still entitled to fat 6-figure pensions.”

Jay Daverth at The Hindsight Factor in “Cutting Pensions for Congressional Convicts”:   ”...And the pendulum swings on”

 

In another reference to the sausage factory (here’s the first one), Harold at Wet Machine wrote:

Tales of the Sausage Factory: Kerry drops another good bill

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) has introduced the Wireless Innovation Act of 2007. This bill is essentially the same excellent bill to force the FCC to open up the White Spaces that Kerry, Allen (now no longer in the Senate), Boxer and Sunnunu introduced in 2006 and was later incorporated into the Stevens Bill.

The bill requires the FCC to complete its pending rulemaking on the broadcast white spaces and allocate the use for unlicensed spectrum. Given that the FCC has shifted into reverse on this and has decided to reexplore the licensed v. unlicensed question, it’s nice to see folks on the Hill pushing for this.

Stay tuned . . . .

Sounds like good advice, Harold.