Opinion Duel: Point Miller

John J. Miller just destroyed Jonathan Cohn on today's opinion duel. Read it for yourself:

Hi Jonathan,

I've just read your link attempting to claim that the president's zinger about the New York Times was "dishonest." I've read it several times, in fact. I simply don't see any dishonesty. Not a shred. Bush's simple point remains wholly intact: It's terribly easy for people to become pessimistic about a situation when they don't have the advantage of historical hindsight. I suppose we'll have to let our readers look at the evidence and decide for themselves.

And yes, I maintain that there's a significant difference between the Cheney/McCain position on the B-2 and John Kerry's record on it. You cite a post-Cold War comment from McCain suggesting that the time had come to pull the plug on the B-2. Fair enough. Kerry, however, was opposing the B-2 much earlier. He wanted to eliminate it in the midst of the Cold War. Running for the Senate in 1984, he included it in a list of military programs he would cancel. (His list also included the B-1 bomber, the Apaches helicopter, the Patriot missile, the F-15, F-14A, and F-14D jets, the AV-8B Harrier jet, the Aegis air-defense cruiser, and the Trident missile system. He further urged reductions for the M1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Tomahawk cruise missile, and the F-16 jet. My main source for this is a Boston Globe article by Brian C. Mooney, published June 19, 2003.)

Kerry was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982 as a nuclear-freeze candidate. In 1983, he wrote a revealing letter to a constituent: "What we as citizens can tell our government is that President Reagan should reorder his priorities. We don't need expensive and exotic weapons systems." Campaigning for the Senate in 1984, when he wanted to slash all the programs mentioned above, he announced: "The biggest defense buildup since World War II has not given us a better defense. Today, Americans are more threatened by the prospect of war, not less so." Here's a Boston Globe editorial from 1984: "[Kerry] opposes the major new weapons systems sought by the President and goes substantially further than the mainstream of his party, as represented by Walter Mondale, by calling for outright reductions in defense spending rather than a mere slowdown in growth." I could continue with Kerry's record on missile defense and various other programs. But I think Zell Miller, in his speech last week, did a pretty good job of summing up Kerry's views: "Against, against, against!"

Last year, in an interview with the Boston Globe, Kerry allowed that some of his positions on national defense in the 1980s were "ill-advised." He added: "I think some of them are stupid in the context of the world we find ourselves in right now and the things that I've learned since then."

I'm tempted to propose a bumper sticker: "John Kerry: Stupid then, stupid now." But you say that you don't want to question Bush's intelligence, so I won't question Kerry's.

Oh, and before we quit the subject of Kerry being a liberal dove: During the first Bush administration, there was a final really important difference between the Cheney/McCain record on military issues and the Kerry record: Cheney and McCain supported the Gulf War; Kerry opposed it.

As usual, Kerry tried to have it both ways — even on an issue as black and white as the vote to authorize war against Iraq in 1991. Check out this report, which my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru filed two years ago:

"In early January 1991, constituent Walter Carter sent Kerry a letter urging him to back the war. He received two responses. A January 22 letter from the senator, addressed to Carter as though he were an opponent of the war, indicated that Kerry favored sanctions and opposed war. A January 31 letter said, 'From the outset of the invasion [of Kuwait by Iraq], I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf.'"

I should probably add that your magazine has criticized Kerry on this matter as well, here.

Yesterday, I said that I did not understand Kerry's current views on Iraq and asked whether you could explain them. You did not. Hey, I understand: We're still trying to figure out what he thought in 1991.

— JJM