It must be damn depressing to be a liberal nowadays. All that talk about how crummy the world is, and no motivation to do anything except complain about it--or in John Kerry’s case, talk about holding a summit about it. I’m sure the terrorists would really dig those summits. They could listen to Kerry tell them about his plan to “fight the war on terrorism” with “every soldier sitting home at the dinner table”. It’s precisely this kind of bamboozling that makes John Kerry unfit to be the Leader of the Free World.

Cut through the flowery rhetoric and spin, and the Kerry ‘plan’ is little more than a maxed-out gong show. To illustrate, here’s a very brief summary of all three Presidential debates, as seen by me:

Bush: Saddam Hussein is gone and the world is better off without him.

Kerry: I have a dream...er, plan for Iraq. The ‘dream’ line was already taken by that black civil rights guy, unfortunately. Hey speaking of blacks, you haven’t met with the Black Congressional caucus yet!

Bush: Um, yes I have, actually.

Kerry. Whatever. Plan. Plan. Plan. Halliburton. Oh that reminds me, your lumber company made 84 bucks! Hah!

Bush: We need to improve health care through tort reform and cost-reduction pooling.

Kerry: Screw that. I’m going to raid Canada’s medicine cabinet for cheap drugs! (Note: This would likely be Kerry’s first unilateral action to have failed his ‘global test’, since Canadian pharmacies have already rejected bulk drug purchases from the USA for fear that to do otherwise would adversely affect supply.)

Bush: I don’t know if sexual orientation is a choice, but I believe in treating people with tolerance, respect and dignity.

Kerry: Whatever. Mary Cheney is a lesbian.

Bush: You’re so LIBERAL that you make Ted Kennedy look conservative.

Kerry: Shhhhhhh! You used the ‘L’ word! Focus groups didn’t like that word. Cut it out with the labeling, okay? Say, isn’t Mary Cheney gay?

Bush: I think it’s important to promote a culture of life.

Kerry: Shut up. Er, I mean, I respect that. Did I mention that I’m Catholic? I have a plan.

Bush: You voted to increase taxes 98 times, while my record favors tax cuts to put more money in people’s pockets.

Kerry: I won’t raise taxes. I promise. I’ll just nickel-and-dime you all to death with user fees, and roll back Bush’s tax cuts. I hope you’re all too stupid to realize what I’m really trying to pull off here, because my campaign depends on you falling for stuff like this.

The contrast between Bush and Kerry, as well as conservatives and liberals, is no sharper than in the area of foreign policy. On one of my recent radio shows, I was talking about how Afghanistan had just hosted its first free elections, and how great it was that the people there finally had control over their government. Under the Taliban rule, torture, executions and massacres were commonplace, and women lived under a constant state of threat and oppression. Now, women in Afghanistan are running for that country’s highest office. All of this represents a blow to oppression, and a huge victory for freedom, democracy and long-term stability. But one of my listeners didn’t see it that way. As far as he was concerned, the Afghan elections were rigged, and the whole thing was a joke. This listener, like John Kerry during the first Presidential debate, complained that the country was still producing opium, and then he went on to lecture me on opium production numbers--right down to the kilogram. Leave it to liberals to know zip-all about politics beyond the usual talking-points, but everything about drug production.

Complaints about the Afghan elections, valid or not, would have materialized in any case. There’s always room for improvement. Look at Florida. Any reasonable human being would recognize that not having average citizens living in fear of their government stringing them up by their fingernails is a good start, but liberals have a vested interest in seeing oppression prevail. Success in Afghanistan would have meant a victory for Bush at home. I’m surprised John Kerry isn’t over there complaining about butterfly ballots and hanging chads. Afghanistan is a brand-new democracy. Give it a little time and have some patience. The same goes for the massive quantities of opium over which Kerry and other liberals are hyperventilating. Listen, once Bush has a handle on the oil in Iraq, then I’m sure he’ll be happy to go ferret out your drugs over in Afghanistan.

For liberals, massacres, torture, discrimination, racism and sexism are fine as long they’re being conducted by third-world tyrants like Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, or Fidel Castro. Interruption of any of the aforementioned activities may be deemed acceptable only if the entire third-world contingent at the United Nations is on-board. Kerry calls this his “global test”. Liberals go insane over Iraqi insurgents being forced to play ‘naked pyramid’ at Abu Ghraib prison, yet they figure Bush shouldn’t have rushed in to stop Saddam Hussein from executing thousands of political prisoners. Bush obviously saw a problem with State Department statistics indicating that Hussein beheaded more than 130 women in less than a year and was starving his own people by stashing food supplies from the Oil-for-Food program in his own warehouses, but John Kerry still feels that Bush’s actions were ‘rushed’. If I’m ever getting the life beaten out of me in a dark alley somewhere, I hope the guy who happens to be walking by isn’t John Kerry. Even in 1990, when the entire world wanted Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, Kerry voted against authorizing the use of force.

All spin aside, these are the simple facts on Iraq: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The onus was on him to show evidence of their destruction, and he didn’t. UN sanctions against him weren’t working because he was circumventing them by gaming the Oil-for-Food program. He had various close dealings with al-Qaeda terrorists. The Kerry/Edwards campaign has acknowledged that at least 60 countries are harboring al-Qaeda terrorists, yet somehow they figure that Iraq was never one of them. It’s pretty clear that George W. Bush found the biggest weapon of mass destruction of all when coalition forces dug him out, unkempt and unshaven, from that hole near Tikrit. If John Kerry is incapable of identifying an obvious threat, how could he be capable of handling one?

The situation in Iraq is still messy, but as First Sgt. Steve Valley of the Combined Information Press Center in Baghdad says, the insurgency is manageable. And when free elections take place early next year, the terrorists will have lost everything they were fighting for. Despite skewed media reports focusing on the negative, things are looking up over there. Pre-war oil production levels of 2.5 million barrels per day are being exceeded. Seventy-two health care clinics are currently under construction (thirteen have been completed). Reconstruction projects have created jobs for 83,000 Iraqis and 310 Iraqi firms. Twelve new electricity generation projects are under construction. Iraqi police, army and National Guard battalions have been trained and should be ready to take over completely from the Americans by the January elections, with Americans only sticking around after that to serve at the will of the new Iraqi government.

If it was up to John Kerry, none of this would have ever been possible. He’d still be exchanging strongly worded letters with Saddam Hussein and planning his next summit. Or, more likely, just planning his next ‘plan’.