Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
by John Cole| 38 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?
I honestly have no idea who this is, but he claims to be Sen. John Kerry:
I know everyone is asking the same question, but who is this guy and where was he in 2004? If you ask me, this was the best speech of the night.
PS- It is about god damned time someone mentioned torture.
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[…] (h/t Balloon Juice) […]
[…] Out come the long blades Copied shamelessly from John Cole: […]
[…] And so John Cole just linked to this video of John Kerry. Supposedly, he’s John Kerry. He’s definitely not the John Kerry of 2004 who I refused to vote for because he failed to stand up for, well, much of anything. (Standard disclaimer: I vote in Massachusetts, so it’s not like it mattered in 2004 that I wrote in “none of the above”.) […]
Big E
it was great to see someone with some anger in their voice start itemizing the many transgressions of the last 8 years……. and your right…
where was this guy 4 years ago……
Ditch Digger
Shorter John Kerry:
“Thank you, thank you so much. I know i fucked up big time 4 years ago, so i’m going to make it up now, triple.”
Lev
Absolutely right. Obama’s team would do well to deploy Kerry more often, and the introduction of the flip-flop framework would definitely be a good thing to work in a bit more.
Seriously, though, Kerry delivered a barn-burner. Passionate, funny, substantive, and right when it was needed. Better late than never I suppose.
EddieInCA
Shorter, shorter Kerry:
Fuck you, GOP, and your mama too!
Max Power
No doubt. The D’s have got a whole lotta fight in ’em this year.
xyzzy
Such is the difference between everything-to-lose and nothing-to-lose. Obama could learn something from this before he veers too much farther off course.
Jon H
I wonder how many minutes of tonight’s speeches were actually broadcast on the networks, rather than being cut by commercials, or talked over by morons.
rawshark
I voted for him.
Jon H
Next convention, there should be signs all over the place saying “WATCH CSPAN”
Ditch Digger
I thought the “Senator McCain VS Candidate McCain” was beauty. They should take this and in the words of some fine English Poets, ‘Run Like Hell’.
Zifnab
Kerry’s allowed to get passionate now because he’s not running for President. If he’d been this firey back in ’04, they’d be replaying the Kerry version of the Howard Dean scream through January.
Kerry lost because he didn’t have the necessary popular support and this left him vulnerable to getting snookered by dirty election tricks in Ohio and Florida. I’ve got more faith in the Obama campaign because Obama’s ground game is shaping up to be far stronger than Kerry’s or Gore’s ever could have been. Firey speeches ultimately have nothing to do with it.
That said, I fucking love hearing Kerry up there and letting people have it.
xyzzy
Just adding: the image of Michelle hugging Obama’s white uncle and afterwards wiping away a tear is somehow, for me, this campaign in a nutshell. This country has for too long been torn apart by racial divisions and insincere politicians; Obama represents a step away from both.
cuzco
I smiled through Bill’s speech, yawned through many others, but this one made me sit up and listen. Kerry took the fight directly to John McCain’s door ripped off his “maverick” suit and exposed him for the fraud he’s become.
Ditch the stupid “houses” jab (it’s starting to sound really lame) and start learning from Kerry’s speech. No need to even call McCain a flip flopper, just prove him to be, like Kerry did tonight.
Awesome speech.
mannemalon
Great speech. Best overall speech, if you take them out of context (ie. Hillary and Bill and the importance theirs had). I was fucking pissed when I saw MSNBC not playing it. I think CNN did. Not sure who else.
Everyone needed to see this speech.
Equal Opportunity Cynic
I thought the “Senator McCain VS Candidate McCain” was beauty. They should take this and in the words of some fine English Poets, ‘Run Like Hell’.
Yep. This could be the theme that wins for Obama. It allows everyone to emulate Biden, being effusive about their friendship with Senator McCain and while remaining free to underscore that Candidate McCain is batshit crazy. It forces the media to comment on this dichotomy, and hopefully to bring it into their consciousness that Candidate McCain isn’t the guy from the Straight-Talk Express so that any further “confusion” of the two is clearly duplicitous.
Max Power
Firey speeches ultimately have nothing to do with it.
Oh, yes they do.
Kerry lost a lot of 2004 votes because he didn’t deliver this kind of speech, and the same can be said of Gore and famously Dukakis. Meanwhile, a whole lot of people just loooved Zell Miller frothing inanely about “spitballs”. That one fired up the base big time.
The fundamental question raised by overly-timid campaigning is this; if the candidate won’t show a little fight during the campaign, why would I think he’ll fight for his policies or defend his country?
Douglas
Great speech.
Did you hear Dennis Kucinich’s? Kerry, Kucinich and Michelle Obama’s best of the convention yet!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv0smG7ptcM
cmorenc
WhatTF? MSNBC did NOT show Kerry’s speech? And I was worked up at CNN at e.g. showing the bloviating moronic pundits spewing rather than showing Gov. Schweitzer last night, or Tammy Duckworth tonight.
Have Keith Olberman and Tweety gone so mad with egoitism that he’s totally lost it, or are his producers forcing these kinds of inexcusable editorial decisions upon them?
Coverage of this convention is BY FAR the most abysmally disgraceful performance by all the cable news networks I’ve ever seen. In many ways, they’ve managed to outdo the shameful fiasco of Pa. dem primary “debate” hosted by ABC news, “moderated” by Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulis.
zuzu's petals
Absolutely fantastic speech.
And he skillfully handled the distinction between the friend he knew and the candidate who sold his soul. Important in pre-empting the predictable howling that he allegedly considered McCain as a running mate in 2004.
Professor Wonderfulness Happymeal
Who knew they’d let that looser make a speech?
Seriously, you guys think that was barnburner fantastic?
No one but blogger junkies watch this shit, a large percentage of the population sees Kerry for what he is, a nothing. A guy who marries rich, doesn’t much care about legislating, windsurfs, a nothing.
The dude barely spent a year in the Nam before he came back and married well. John McCAIN spent 5 and a half years.
Conservatively Liberal
As I said in the other thread, where in the hell was this Kerry in 2004? This Kerry would have beat the shit out of Bu$h in 2004, hands down. Excellent and I hope to hear more of Kerry like this.
McCain can’t talk about it because when it was done to him, we called it torture. But now that we have stamped “APPROVED” on those techniques, he can’t say anything except that he was a POW once. I would love to see McCain get into the specifics about his ‘torture’ and have to answer why it is not torture now.
It took a Swift-boated vet to say something about what McCain had to endure and now approves of. Now who is the honorable vet?
Sister Machine Gun of Mild Harmony
Awesome. Political consultants should be taken out and shot. If they had been, THIS Kerry would have been the one running for office in 2004.
Rome Again
Something tells me this is NoIQ’s new handle, now that Hillary is NOT 44.
douglasfactors
Before he came back and married well.
You’re not very bright, are you?
Digital Amish
Indeed it is. And corruption and cronyism and fear mongering and lying and scientific suppression and prossecutorial malfeasance and criminal ineptitude and…
I haven’t been able to watch much of the convention. When I’ve watched the talking heads they keep blattering about the need for “Obama’s story” to be put forth. Fuck that. Fuck ‘stories’. The truth that needs to be put forth is that the Republican party (George Bush didn’t bring us to this point single handed) is a putrid cancer.
RareSanity
Spruced it up a little bit, hope you don’t mind…
Nikki
And he couldn’t leave, dammit! He was locked up in a bamboo hut! For 5 and a half years! He suffered! For you! POW!
Chet
who is this guy and where was he in 2004?
Campaigning for president with the “help” of the DNC party apparatus. If you wanted to compile a list of everybody in the Democratic Party that might actually be a secret GOP operative, you could start with every single person in charge of a major national campaign between 2000 and 2006.
Tsulagi
Didn’t see his speech last night; thanks for the clip. Yeah, who was that guy, and what did he do with the “global test” version?
Don’t know why McCain keeps angling for sympathy for his years as a POW. According to this admin, he wasn’t tortured. One of the guiding opinions from that great humanitarian legal scholar, John Yoo, said nothing short of directly causing major organ failure constituted torture.
Length held? Necessary. This admin has said they can keep anyone’s ass as long as they like at their discretion regardless of any facts or their adjudication. Mavericky air aside, McCain went ass up in support of this and torture enhanced interrogation. So it seems the VC were merely early day Bush American patriots serious about their country’s national security. Those visionaries set the example, and this admin willingly followed. You should be proud, John McCain.
Tsulagi
Meant to put a strikeout through “torture” before “enhanced interrogation” in my last paragraph above. Must be clear, enhanced interrogation is not torture. Yeah, gotta love that enhanced interrogation, I got me some of that at that vacation retreat, Camp Mackall.
While not as polished as some of last night’s speakers, veteran Tammy Duckworth was excellent and spot on. Glad I wasn’t watching CNN/MSNBC as likely pinheads would have been talking over her
b. hussein canuckistani
Life has few moments of satisfaction as pure as seeing Obama’a great-uncle being brought out for cheers and applause. How is TIDOS Yankee going to spin that one? Maybe he will just decide that it’s proof that Democrats are Jew-lovers, freeing death camps and all that.
Charity
Remember in 2004 when the RNC thought it would be “cute” and “fun” to make fun of Kerry’s Purple Heart by drawing little purple hearts on Band-Aids and wearing them?
Did anyone make any jokes about McCain’s POW time this year? Any little POW stickers for “fun”?
That’s because at heart the DNC has some class.
PS, Obama’s great-uncle for the win. Thank YOU for your service, sir.
Rome Again
See, Hillary lost because of GOP operative Terry McAuliffe, not Obama supporters. ;)
Delia
Kerry is like Gore. He had to go through gooper hell and get all the upper class niceties and restraints burned out of him before he could be a good campaigner. Now that they’ve seen the enemy they know what to do.
LanceThruster
I heard Michael Dukakis on FAUX the other day kicking ass and that was my thought for him as well (i.e. where was this guy when he was running?)
It seems once they quit having to pretend to be who the advisors/handlers want them to be you learn why they rose in prominence in the first place. The same pretty much goes for Hillary.