John Kerry, a real Democrat

I caught John Kerry being interviewed by Timmy on Meet the Press this morning. The video and transcript should be up on the Web site later today.

Timmy did ask about the Hersh report that the Bush administration is considering using nukes against Iran. He didn't ask about it first, but he did ask. And Kerry just said flat-out it was a bad idea. And talked about the "military option" as being the worst possible option, with limited chances of success.

I was impressed hearing Kerry talking about his Iraq pullout plan. Timmy jammed him pretty hard - in a way he rarely does with Republicans - about his past statements opposing such an idea. Kerry came back saying that changes had changed and Bush had failed to take the other steps that he had previously recommended. Essentially he said that we should declare victory and leave. He talked about the successful elections that Bush has been bragging about and said that our soldiers had done their job. And that it wasn't for American soldiers to be fighting in the Iraqi civil war.

He also brought up Bush's promise that "as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down". According to Bush's optimistic figures about training the Iraqi security forces, we're already very near the target number of trained Iraqis. So why aren't the American forces starting to withdraw?

He also said straightforwardly that he was wrong to have voted for the Iraq War resolution in October 2002. (I suppose it would have been too much to ask for him to point out that Bush had blatantly violated that war resolution in the way he actually went to war.)

And Kerry also said without hemming and hawing that he would vote for Feingold's censure resolution. He ducked Timmy's question about impeachment. But, on the whole, he did very well, I thought.

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