Tag: John Kerry

Give Me Liberty or Give Me the FEC

There’s a famous quote — misattributed to Voltaire — that goes, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” John Kerry and George Bush seem to want to replace that maxim with, “If I don’t like your ad, I’ll whine to the Federal Elections Commission.”

Kerry went from saying “bring it on” in response to questions about his war record to a “please make it stop” complaint with the FEC. Bush isn’t much better, trumpeting his signing of the campaign finance reform law and demanding an end to ads that are outside of that framework.

It’s amusing to see the two men vying for the most powerful elected office in the world running scared from the likes of MoveOn.Org or Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

This is the best we have to choose from?

Democrats and the Death Penalty

To my mind, John Kerry is worst sort of death penalty opponent. For years he’s solidly against capital punishment regardless of the crime, including terrorism. When it becomes politically expedient, however, he’s suddenly pro-capital punishment when it comes to terrorists.

When asked about his “evolving” position on terrorism, Kerry said,

I oppose the death penalty other than in cases of real international and domestic terrorism. We know we have put innocent people to death; 111 innocent people have already been released from death row. As president, I’ll enforce the law but I’ll also have a national moratorium on federal executions until we use DNA evidence to make sure those on death row are guilty.

Right, because of course it would be impossible to make a mistake and wrongly put to death someone convicted of a terrorist act. Not. It’s obvious, for example, that Tim McVeigh was guilty of the terrorist attack on the Oklahoma City Federal Building, but nonetheless his trial was marred by serious instances of FBI misconduct.

Apparently juries are faulty except when they’re considering terrorist cases, in which case this problem is just swept away.

And, of course, DNA evidence may exonerate some individuals but it cannot with certainty establish guilt as Kerry implies. Though, as I’ve pointed out before, this is one of the inevitable misunderstandings that will lead to DNA evidence being used as an argument in favor of the death penalty.

In writing the Democratic National Committee’s platform, the platform committee took the easy way out — they simply eliminated any mention of capital punishment at all. The previous three DNC platforms, by contrast, had strong pro-death penalty language. Dukakis was the last anti-death penalty presidential candidate and Carter the last anti-death penalty president.

This is not, by the way, the first time that Kerry has altered his death penalty views to bend with the political winds. Kerry has called for a moratorium on the federal death penalty and advocated for giving defendants access to more resources to prove their innocence.

But in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, Kerry voted for the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. That law placed a number of new obstacles in the path of death row inmates trying to appeal their sentence, including limiting such convicts to just a single habeas corpus appeal.

Defending America

I’m with Glenn Reynolds on this quote from John Kerry’s speech tonight,

I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as President. Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response. I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security. And I will build a stronger American military.

First, it’s interesting that Kerry now sees his service in Vietnam as defending the United States. So does he now see his anti-war efforts as undermining America’s efforts to defend itself? Does Kerry believe anything about Vietnam that isn’t politically expedient at the moment?

As for responding to attacks — the President of the United States has at his disposal the most powerful military in world history. Don’t tell me you’re going to use that power to respond to attacks — tell me you’re going to use it to prevent attacks in the first place, even if it pisses off the rest of the world.

Take a hypothetical — suppose a President Kerry has relatively strong evidence that Iran is funding a terrorist organization that is plotting attacks against the United States. I don’t want to hear that he’s going to talk to our allies and then talk to the terrorists,

We need a strong military and we need to lead strong alliances. And then, with confidence and determination, we will be able to tell the terrorists: You will lose and we will win. The future doesnÂ’t belong to fear; it belongs to freedom.

Even Jimmy Carter could have done that. What I want to hear is that he’d give the Iranians an ultimatum and then eliminate the threat using whatever means necessary.

We don’t need anymore Afghanistans, where we get rid of a despotic government after terrorists it harbors kill thousands of people.

Kerry vs. Ashcroft on Civil Liberties

Politics creates such odd matchups sometimes. Today it’s John Kerry promising not to let John Ashcroft destroy our civil liberties. But a decade ago, as Reason reminds us, it was Kerry who was trying desperately to restrict civil liberties while Ashcroft defended them,

This isn’t the first time Kerry and Ashcroft have been at odds over civil liberties. In the 1990s, government proposals to restrict encryption inspired a national debate. Then as now, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and electronic privacy groups locked horns with the DOJ and law enforcement agencies. Then as now, Kerry and Ashcroft were on opposite sides.

But there was noteworthy difference in those days. Then it was Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) who argued alongside the ACLU in favor of the individual’s right to encrypt messages and export encryption software. Ashcroft “was kind of the go-to guy for all of us on the Republican side of the Senate,” recalls David Sobel, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

And in what now seems like a bizarre parallel universe, it was John Kerry who was on the side of the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the DOJ. Ashcroft’s predecessor at the Justice Department, Janet Reno, wanted to force companies to create a “clipper chip” for the government—a chip that could “unlock” the encryption codes individuals use to keep their messages private. When that wouldn’t fly in Congress, the DOJ pushed for a “key escrow” system in which a third-party agency would have a “backdoor” key to read encrypted messages.

As late as 1997, Reason notes, Kerry was the first co-sponsor to John McCain’s Secure Public Networks Act which would have created a national key escrow registry and solidified the Clinton ban on encryption exports (they should have called this the Encourage Encryption Offshoring Act).

There’s also this Kerry response to a defense of strong encryption that appeared in Wired, in which Kerry alludes to those murder in the first World Trade Center attack and the Oklahoma City bombing,

[O]ne would be hard-pressed,” he wrote, “to find a single grieving relative of those killed in the bombings of the World Trade Center in New York or the federal building in Oklahoma City who would not have gladly sacrificed a measure of personal privacy if it could have saved a loved one.

I guess he actually voted in favor of sacrificing freedom for security before he voted against it.

Source:

John Kerry’s Monstrous Record on Civil Liberties. John Berlau, Reason, July 26, 2004.

First Gay President?

Some folks have seen fit to set these pictures to music resulting what Glenn Reynolds calls Kerry/Edwards slash movies such as this.

And why the hell not. If Bill Clinton could take the title as the first black president, who’s to stop Kerry from claiming the mantle as the first gay president (well, depending on which side of the gay marriage debate he’s on this week).

Why Would Al Qaeda Target Spain?

So apparently Al Qaeda is taking responsibility for the terrorist attack in Spain, saying that it was done to punish that country for allying itself with the United States, specifically for Spain’s support of the war against Iraq.

But wait a minute — that makes no sense at all. As we all know, the war against Iraq was a preemptive military action carried out unilaterally by the Bush administration without consulting, much less coordinating with, any allies.

If Al Qaeda would only follow John Kerry’s speeches, they’d know that the United States had no international support for its war against Iraq and leave the Spaniards alone.