GOOD ADVICE FOR JOHN KERRY

This Eric Alterman column in The Nation is a must-read for the Kerry campaign:

With his hypercautious position on Iraq--"measured," in the opinion of the New York Times--Kerry risks leaving many of those who rightly see the war as a catastrophe with nowhere to go to express their outrage. As with the election of 1968, an increasingly antiwar electorate is being offered only prowar choices for the presidency. It is just possible, therefore, that Nader may once again insure Bush's "victory" in the election, dooming the world to four more years of a neoconservative imperialism and rogue American militarism.

In 1968 our choices for president were Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey, Vice President under Lyndon Johnson, was inextricably linked to Johnson's Vietnam war policy and refused to recant. I remember being absolutely buffaloed by that decision, seeing that Johnson himself declined to run for reelection because his policies would clearly result in his defeat. Why did Humphrey think he would fare better? In Nixon's case, he said he had a "secret plan to end the war." Nobody really believed it, but what was our alternative? So we ended up with a creepy, paranoid president who didn't end the war either, or at least not until he had to run for re-election.

This nation simply cannot tolerate another four years of this ill-advised venture we call the "liberation of Iraq." I support John Kerry for reasons other than his badly defined stand on Iraq -- namely the economy, fairer taxation, the environment, healthcare, etc. Many of my progressive friends feel the same. But I like him best when he says right out that "these guys are a bunch of liars and crooks," and I think it's past time that he made it clear that they're also a bunch of incompetents who not only can't IMPLEMENT strategy, they can't FORMULATE it. If he agrees with the strategy but not the implementation, that gives them more credibility than they deserve -- and does damage to his own.