October 1, 2004

Kerry On North Korea

Last night, John Kerry said that the right way to end the threat of North Korea having nuclear weapons is to deal directly with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Mentally Il instead of the six-nation process that President Bush is pursuing.

It's worth noting that Kerry has thus taken the same position on that issue as Kim Jong Il.

Also last night, Kerry criticized America's development of nuclear "bunker buster" bombs that are designed to destroy hardened facilities buried deep under ground. Both North Korea and Iran are developing their nuclear weapons in hardened facilities buried deep underground. Kerry doesn't want America to have the capability to destroy those facilities. I'm sure that makes the Mad Mullahs of Tehran and the insane dictator of North Korea happy.

UPDATE: Paul M. at Powerline writes:

Usually, candidates tend to reveal their true colors towards the end of a long debate. Tonight, Kerry did so at least three times. First, when asked to identify the most serious threat we face, he said it was nuclear proliferation, not terrorism. And he mentioned that he wrote a book about the subject, pre-9/11. This illustrates how, deep down, Kerry filters the war against terrorism through his lifelong "no nukes" leftist prism. Unfortunately, Bush didn't do much better in his response to the same question, broadening Kerry's answer to include all WMD in the hands of terrorists but not mentioning Islamofascism or Jihad. Kerry, who probably sensed his error, quickly endorsed Bush's view, with an assist from Jim Lehrer (who tossed Kerry more softballs than a batter practice pitcher at a church picnic). But soon thereafter, Kerry committed a more acute version of the same error when he argued that we were sending "mixed messages" by developing new nuclear weapons of our own, while talking about how to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists. This was leftist "moral equivalence" at its worse, but again the president didn't call him on it. Finally, let's not forget Kerry's insistence on passing the global test, and his claim that in order to regain the world's respect we have "a lot of earning back to do." If the debate had lasted another half hour, Kerry might have been speaking French.