Mark Steyn on John Kerry

The Monk hopes he's the first American in the blogosphere to link this. An outstanding piece by Mark Steyn on John Kerry in the Daily Telegraph. National Review should have prohibited him from getting this published anywhere else (Steyn writes the Happy Warrior column for NR).

Here is a great excerpt:

If I were a mad scientist hired by Bush svengali Karl Rove to construct the most unelectable Democratic presidential candidate possible, I'd start with a load of big-government one-size-fits-all dependency-culture domestic policies. Next I'd throw in a consistent two-decade voting-record aversion to American military power. Then make him the kind of fellow whose stump speeches are always butt-numbingly ponderous and go on way too long because someone told him that if you intone a platitude slowly and sonorously enough it sounds like the Kennedy inaugural address.

He'd probably be a senator because, in a business that attracts pompous blowhards, senators are the crème de la crème. A senator from Massachusetts, because that's as near as you can get to running Jacques Chirac while still meeting the citizenship eligibility requirements. He'd have to be an aristocratic Massachusetts senator, because there don't seem to be any other kinds, but he wouldn't be glamorously high-class, like Jack and Camelot, just aloof and condescending and affected. And every time he tries to talk a little guy talk, a little hunting or baseball, it doesn't come out quite right. And he's so nuanced he's running not only as America's most famous war hero but also as America's most famous anti-war protester.

No, scrub that last bit. No one would believe it.

But Steyn is completely on his game in this one. His comment about the US press is priceless:

My ne plus ultra of unelectability was chosen by Democratic primary voters this spring mainly because he was perceived to be "electable". I don't know where they got that idea from. Probably from the American media, who seem barely to recognise Kerry's principal defect – his boring self-righteousness – perhaps because it's also theirs.

Nonetheless, there are serious challenges facing the US in the next four years and voting for Kerry would have negative consequences, to say the least. After noting that the electorate is likely tired from the war footing of the past three years, Steyn notes: The notion that you can take a four-year intermission from the war is appealing, but a fantasy. Both Iran and North Korea are likely to come to the boil during the next presidential term, and nothing in either John Kerry's record or temperament suggests he's up to settling either of those crises in America's favour. So our hopes of avoiding Armageddon may rest on how effectively Kerry bores his candidacy into the ground.

There's more. Read it.