This man wants to be President in 2008

John Podhoretz wrote a great op-ed about the less than gracious Demo response to the splendid election turn-out in Iraq yesterday. He includes within this op-ed a great riff on John Kerry:

[The successful election is] a big fat gigantic winning vindication of the guy that the Moores and Kennedys and millions of others still can't believe anybody voted for. And they know it. And it's killing them. Case in point: the junior Eeyore from Massachusetts, John Forbes Kerry, who had the distinct misfortune of being booked onto "Meet the Press" yesterday only 90 minutes after the polls closed in Iraq — and couldn't think of a thing to say that didn't sound negative. "No one in the United States should try to overhype this election," said the man who actually came within 3 million votes of becoming the leader of the Free World back in November. No? How about "underhyping"? How about belittling it? How about acting as though it doesn't matter all that much? That's what Kerry did, and in so doing, revealed yet again that he has the emotional intelligence of a pet rock and the political judgment of a . . . well, of a John Kerry. At the worst possible time to express pessimistic skepticism, Kerry did just that. The election only had a "kind of legitimacy," he said. He said he "was for the election taking place" (how big of him!), but then said that "it's gone as expected." Hey, wait a second. If it went as Kerry "expected," how could he have been "for the election taking place" — since the election only had, in his view, a "kind of legitimacy"? I mean, who would want an election with only a "kind of legitimacy"? Is Kerry perhaps saying he was for the election before he was against it? Kerry views the results in Iraq as being less legitimate than, say, the opinions about U.S. conduct in Iraq as expressed to him by "Arab leaders." In a truly jaw-dropping moment, he told Tim Russert approvingly of his conversations with those self-same Arab leaders — Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan among them — who expressed concerns about the Bush administration's approach in Iraq. Kerry seems to believe that the autocrats and oligarchs in the region are actually rooting for the creation of a democracy in their midst — and want to help the United States make it happen.