Monday, October 25, 2004
Kerry lies about UN meetings
The Washington Times is reporting that John Kerry's claim -- made as recently as the second presidential debate -- to have met with "the entire security council" for "a couple of hours" before voting to authorize the use of force to disarm Iraq in October of 2002, is as false as Joan Rivers's face.
Four of the five members of the security council at that time that Joel Mowbray was able to contact directly report they never had any contact with Kerry. And though Kerry did meet with a few foreign dignitaries, the only ones Mowbray could confirm were Cameroon, Singapore, and France -- all contributors of mighty legions in the fight against global terrorism. No? Okay, all of them ardent supporters of freedom and the defeat of the terrorists. Right? No? Okay, but at least these foreign leaders support Kerry, right?
All right, so Kerry lied again. Big deal. It isn't even the biggest whopper he's told -- he did at least meet with some of the council members, right? That makes what he said somewhat true. Say he met with all of them that Mowbray was unable to reach for comment... plus one of the ones that he did... that's still 11 out of 15, right? That makes it, what, let's see, 73.3% true. Why am I getting all wound up about a mere 26.7% lie?
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Four of the five members of the security council at that time that Joel Mowbray was able to contact directly report they never had any contact with Kerry. And though Kerry did meet with a few foreign dignitaries, the only ones Mowbray could confirm were Cameroon, Singapore, and France -- all contributors of mighty legions in the fight against global terrorism. No? Okay, all of them ardent supporters of freedom and the defeat of the terrorists. Right? No? Okay, but at least these foreign leaders support Kerry, right?
All right, so Kerry lied again. Big deal. It isn't even the biggest whopper he's told -- he did at least meet with some of the council members, right? That makes what he said somewhat true. Say he met with all of them that Mowbray was unable to reach for comment... plus one of the ones that he did... that's still 11 out of 15, right? That makes it, what, let's see, 73.3% true. Why am I getting all wound up about a mere 26.7% lie?
Or, worst-case scenario: the three countries Mowbray confirmed were the only ones Kerry actually met with. That's still only an 80% lie. He told 20% of the truth, and that's 20% more of the truth than of the WMD's we've found in Iraq, right?
I've found no better summary of why it's important than this:
Bottom line, folks: John Kerry has spent the past two years repeating over and over and over and over and over and over and over again the lie that he had a single sit-down meeting with the United Nations Security Council prior to the Iraq war resolution vote. The reality is that he met with a mere handful of Security Council constituency personnel -- members of four, perhaps five, and certainly fewer than half of the delegations -- in scattered, ad hoc encounters over a vague period of time.
This isn't mere exaggeration. It's an outright lie -- by this standard, I've convened meetings of the Security Council -- and as I said, it matters. For this is no mere game of rhetorical gotcha. Rhetorical gotcha is digging up a film clip of John Edwards at a function with the Vice President; it is calling the President on a regrettable lapse of memory, and pretending this constitutes a serious critique of either. We can expect honest Democrats who reveled in these examples to feel sorrow and shame at the exposure of John Kerry. We can also expect this demographic to be vanishingly small.
This isn't gotcha: it directly undermines a key element of the Kerry mythos. After a public lifetime of anti-Americanism and fecklessness, Kerry knows that he needs drive home the five points listed above in order to convince the American people of his fitness to represent and lead our nation abroad. How to square this with that? How to explain the big lie? How to dismiss the appropriation of -- and believe us, the insult to -- these nations with whom Kerry will purportedly work and ally? How to pretend that this is the act of a man laying claim as a central campaign theme the pretense to superior diplomacy, and yes, honesty? How to explain that nettlesome Iraq war resolution vote now? What does John Kerry say? Does he forthrightly acknowledge his error? Or, like the loudmouthed teenager caught bragging about romantic conquests never made, does he simply pretend it never happened?
One thing is certain: we don't have to.
Go read the rest of it. It scalds.
Via Michelle Malkin, via Power Line.
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