Kerry Battles Back Against Nuance!

No shades of gray for this fellow! So emphatic is he that our "Drollery detector" indicates that TIME is having a bit of fun with him:

The President hates the word nuance—how about you, Senator?

Kerry begins coolly: "Some of these issues are very complicated and deserve more than a simplistic this or that," says the diplomat's son, the diligent student of policy and history practically from birth, the 19-year veteran of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Davos regular with his Rolodex fat with kings and prime ministers and experts of all stripes. But as he speaks, Kerry heats up, grows loud, almost angry. His message shifts: Don't for a moment think all that worldliness means he has no convictions. Or that he is weak or a waffler or a political opportunist.

Emphasis added; maybe they aren't mocking him. Let's continue:

"I don't think war is nuanced at all. I think how you take a nation to war is the most fundamental decision a President makes," he says, "and there's nothing nuanced at all about keeping your promises. There is nothing nuanced about exhausting remedies that give you legitimacy and consent to go to war. And I refuse ever to accept the notion that anything I've suggested with respect to Iraq was nuanced. It was clear. It was precise. It was, in fact, prescient. It was ahead of the curve about what the difficulties were. And that is precisely what a President is supposed to be. I think I was right, 100% correct, about how you should have done Iraq."

Really? Here is the Senate floor speech of the 100% prescient Amazing Kerrynac. Kerry seems to have adopted a "say-anything" tactic intended to exploit a particular quirk of media bias criticized by Paul Krugman, Mark Kleiman, and no doubt many others - when faced with an absurd claim, the media will merely run an offsetting quote from another viewpoint, rather than attempt to determine "the truth".

Will such a tactic serve the Senator? Time will tell, and good luck to him. However, if it fails, it may be in part because the same reporters he is attempting to spin today wrote the "Shades of Gray" stories last winter. And fall. And summer.

TIME unsheaths the dagger a bit later:

Kerry sometimes presses his case too hard. He criticizes Bush for failing to get countries like Saudi Arabia to share the financial burden of the Iraq war, the way Bush's father did in Gulf War I, and suggests that their refusal calls into question the second war's legitimacy—even though the Saudis helped out back in 1991 because Saddam was threatening their oil fields. In December, Kerry asked why countries like Germany and France would cooperate in the war on terrorism "after having been publicly castigated and even ridiculed for disagreeing over Iraq." In fact, American counterterrorism officials say those two countries are among the U.S.'s most valuable allies, often better about cooperating than even the British, whose concern about civil liberties sometimes trumps security worries. Pressed on the point, Kerry folds. He says the lack of cooperation is elsewhere but is hard pressed to cite countries, finally mentioning "South Asia and the Middle East."

Ouch. And another "ouch" for this:

Kerry also implies that one alternative was leaving Saddam in power."I never doubted Saddam Hussein's untrustworthiness and willingness to try to dupe the world," he says. "But we did have a no-fly zone over two-thirds of the country, and we had the ongoing inspections. If we could contain Russia through the cold war, certainly we could have dealt more effectively with Saddam Hussein through the international community." Kerry does acknowledge that the U.S. and the world are better off with Saddam in prison. But he argues that the ends do not justify the means, and while he refuses to call the war a mistake, he certainly implies as much when he talks at length about the ways in which America is now "weaker."

The "ongoing inspections" resumed in 2002 after being suspended in 1998 only because Bush and Blair were threatening force; the sanctions (or here), of which "Oil-for-Food" was a part, were a disaster. But Kerry knows that.

MORE: Note to Kerry - Don't fight it - embrace your inner Hamlet, and move on. We get this from MoDo:

When I gave George W. Bush a culture quiz in 2000, he gamely struggled to come up with one answer in each category, calling baseball his favorite "cultural experience."

Mr. Kerry, on the other hand, struggled to stop coming up with a cascade of things in each category, rarely settling on a definite favorite.

In what may be an interesting harbinger for their debates, W. raced through his whole interview in the same time Mr. Kerry took to answer the first question about his favorite movie. After he had roamed through 37 movies, ranging from his "Fellini stage" to his Adam Sandler period, from "National Velvet" to "The Deer Hunter" to "Men in Black," Mr. Kerry's aides began to hover.

The Republicans would denounce it as film flip-flopping, no doubt.

Happy to oblige. Look, if we were electing dinner party company, Kerry would be a heavy favorite. I have friends who will respond to "How did you like the movie" with "Anyone who didn't love it is nuts". Decisive, yes, but what happened to the lost art of conversation? Where's the give and take, the ebb and flow? OTOH, in their day jobs these friends are decisive. Go figure.

UPDATE: Stevens Greene and Den Beste join in. And from the San Fran Chronicle, Kerry's explanation of his war resolution vote is classic:

"What we thought we were doing was getting him (Bush) to a place where it would be harder to go to war."

Ahhh! So when I vote for Bush this November, it is really intended to make it harder for him to implement his evil plans. Got it!

More Kerry prescience on Meet The Press. No, really - he insists he will do well in Iowa! It is Iraq that is problematic.

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Link to TIME article