question about Kerry's speech today

In his speech, he said this:

"as I said more than a year ago, knowing what we
know now, I would not have gone to war in Iraq. And knowing now the full
measure of the Bush Administration's duplicity and incompetence, I doubt
there are many members of Congress who would give them the authority
they abused so badly. I know I would not."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5177000&mesg_id=5177000

However, that is not what I remember from last year.

"Kerry said: "Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have.""

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52839-2004Aug9.html

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/09/kerry.iraq/

Can someone explain this to me?? I so want to support Kerry, but sometimes he makes it so damn hard.

(BTW you are snipping "the authority" part out of context - he says a lot more that is critical of Bush and Bush;s war) But at any rate see this other quote:

THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: THE CAMPAIGN; In Harshest Critique Yet, Kerry Attacks Bush Over War in Iraq
New York Times, Late Edition - Final, Sec. A, p 1 09-21-2004
By JODI WILGOREN and ELISABETH BUMILLER


In an interview with David Letterman broadcast Monday night on the "Late Show," Mr. Kerry was asked directly whether, had he been elected president in 2000, he would have taken the country to war in Iraq. Mr. Kerry said simply, "No."

Pressed about whether American troops would be in Iraq now if a Kerry administration had received the same intelligence the Bush administration had, Mr. Kerry said: "We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction. We know now there was no connection to Al Qaeda. We know there was no imminent threat and under those circumstances. I would not have taken America to war."

In the Grand Canyon statement he's referring to the question of whether it was the right vote AT THE TIME. He's essentially saying that given what was known at the time, it made sense to threaten war as a ploy to get inspectors in. In hindsight, knowing there were no WMDs, the resolution makes no sense.

To his credit, he's been saying since September of last year that going to war was a mistake and that if he were president he would not have gone to war.

That said, I'll admit that while I like Kerry a lot, supported him in the primaries last year, and overall feel like he ran a pretty good campaign, particularly in the final two months, I think that Grand Canyon statement was a gross mistake. Even if it can be intellectually defended, the parsing it takes is ridiculous. Personally I think Kerry was simply trying to keep from saying something that the Republicans would use as an example of a "flip-flop" but in the process he wound up clumsily making things even more complicated.

I had the same "wha--?" reaction when I read that he said that. I didn't try to google it, but I'd like to be pointed to the exact occasion when he supposedly said it. All I remember is cringing when he said he would have voted to give Bush the authority to go to war.

The "authority quote" had a lot of other stuff critical of bush not telling the truth

Please also see the letterman quote in my post.

If he had been as clear and direct as he now claims, we would have remembered the statement. If he had been as succinct in his answer to reporters as he was to David Letterman, we would have had a clear memory of that simple "No."

But it's not in his nature to be clear and direct, or succinct, and that was to his great detriment. I think he is an intelligent man, but sometimes his shades-of-gray thinking blurs whatever is at the heart of what he is trying to say.


And hey, you know, sometimes people are typing a response of their own at the same time you are, so they haven't had a chance to see yours yet. Chill.

cuz it is damn cold outside tonite!

:toast:

I do think he is a very intelligent person, he just does not communicate very well at times, which makes it hard to support him at times.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/11/14/on_the_trail_of_kerrys_failed_dream/

On the afternoon of Aug. 9, John F. Kerry stood on the lip of the Grand Canyon, about to make one of the biggest mistakes of his three-year quest for the presidency. A stiff wind was blowing across the canyon, and Kerry, whose hearing was damaged by gun blasts in Vietnam, had trouble understanding some of the questions being thrown his way. But he pressed on, coughing from the pollen blowing on the breeze.

Would Kerry have voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, one reporter asked, even if he knew then that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction? "Yes, I would have voted for the authority; I believe it's the right authority for a president to have," Kerry replied, as aides stood by, dumbfounded.

Kerry's answer ricocheted around the political world. Faced with the revelation that almost all the prewar arguments for invading Iraq were wrong -- the existence of weapons of mass destruction, close links to Al Qaeda -- President Bush had nonetheless insisted that he would do nothing differently. And he had been challenging Kerry to do the same, hoping to catch the Democrat changing his position on the unpopular war.

The senator explained to aides that part of the question had been lost in the wind; he thought he was answering a variation on the same basic query he'd been asked countless times: Was it right to give Bush the authority to go to war against Iraq? Kerry had simply given his standard "yes," with the proviso that he would have "done this very differently from the way President Bush has" -- yet the misunderstanding now muddied Kerry's message.

Worried advisers briefly considered issuing a clarification, but feared it might further feed Republican efforts to portray Kerry as a "flip-flopper."

"authority" quote taken out of context of harsh criticism of bush

<snip>

The U.S. senator from Massachusetts said the congressional resolution gave Bush "the right authority for the president to have."

But he told reporters on a campaign swing through Arizona, "I would have done this very differently from the way President Bush has." He challenged Bush to answer four questions.

"My question to President Bush is why did he rush to war without a plan to win the peace?" Kerry asked. "Why did he rush to war on faulty intelligence and not do the hard work necessary to give America the truth?

"Why did he mislead America about how he would go to war? Why has he not brought other countries to the table in order to support American troops in the way that we deserve it and relieve a pressure from the American people?

"There are four, not hypothetical questions like the president's, but real questions that matter to Americans," Kerry said. "And I hope you'll get the answers to those questions because the American people deserve them."

<snip>

stick a fork in Kerry, he is DINO'd

1. how is he a zero?

2. Leiberman is a DINO. Kerry is too liberal to be a DINO.

3. He is still involved in lawsuits in Ohio, and so can not properly be said to have "quit" them.

4. He doesn't seem to have quit on America either yet, and esp. veterans.

Unfortunately, the context actually means something with Kerry. You can do the Republican talking points thing with him easy if you don't bother to look into the context of his statement...