For all those who are disappointed in W - count me as one of those - you can at least make yourself feel better secure in the knowledge that John Kerry would have been much worse.

The guy seems to have completely lost control of his mental faculties. Although, that assumes he had control of them to begin with and I don't think I would take that bet.

This week in the U.S. Senate, he came up with an amendment that would have required virtually all of the 127,000 U.S. troops in Iraq to be withdrawn by July 1 of next year.

Now, I'm not going to debate the merits of the amendment. (The Senate defeated it 86-13, by the way.) You may or may not think that's a good idea and I certainly think there is a principled argument on both sides of the issue of withdrawing troops form Iraq.

What I don't get is how John Kerry has become the Democratic point man for troop withdrawal.

He got himself on the radio with Don Imus.

Imus asked whether telling the Iraqis that all our troops would be home by a certain date might not be kind of dumb because they could just wait us out and then start wrecking havoc.

That was a fair question. Here's the answer:

"On the contrary. What it does is provide the only opportunity for success. 'Stay the course' is not a plan. And what this administration wants is to have a fake debate, as usual. They're - you hear the drum beat on every television show from every commentator, 'cut and run, cut and run, cut and run, cut and run.' That's their phrase. They found their three words. They love to do that. And they're going to try to make the elections in November a choice between 'cut and run' and 'stay the course'. That's not the choice. My plan is not 'cut and run.' Their plan is 'lie and die.' And that's what they are doing. They lie to America, what's happening on the ground. They lie about why we're there. They lie about what's happening. And our plan is very simple. It's redeploy to win the war on terror. Change to succeed. You have a better chance of success if the Iraqis are given notice that they've got to begin to take over and stand up for themselves. It's very simple. Iraqis have to fight for Iraq."

Kerry had this to say during a newspaper interview:

"As far as I'm concerned, we should go right at Karl Rove and his phony tough talk that is calculated purely for the election and not for a successful strategy in Iraq. I'm doing what I think is the right thing to do as a policy matter for our troops and for the country. Someone else will deal with politics."

Politics, indeed.

Honestly, I don't know how he conducts interviews with a straight face. I want to repeat that I am not arguing the merits of the message, just the credibility of the messenger.

Let's roll back the clocks a little bit.

Remember the Gulf War in 1991? It was back then that neocons Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, et. al. wanted George Bush Sr. to push on to Baghdad. He didn't do it because the U.N. only authorized removing Saddam from Kuwait. Kerry voted against the 1991 war authorization.

Kerry was a dove.

Remember 1998. Bill Clinton is lobbying missiles at chemical weapons plants or baby milk factories, depending on who you talked to.

Kerry was all over this issue. Going on all the talk shows, he was out front as one of the most hawkish members of the Senate.

He actually advocated an invasion. He was saying that we could lob missiles all we wanted, but as long as Saddam was in power, the WMD threat would always exist. He was saying Clinton was weak and Saddam should be removed.

No more dove.

Now, here's part of a 2003 speech in New York given by Presidential candidate John Kerry:

"In fact, I fear that in the run-up to the 2004 election, the administration is considering what is tantamount to a cut-and-run strategy. Their sudden embrace of accelerated Iraqification and American troop withdrawal dates, without adequate stability, is an invitation to failure. The hard work of rebuilding Iraq must not be dictated by the schedule of the next American election ... It would be a disaster and a disgraceful betrayal of principle to speed up the process simply to lay the groundwork for a politically expedient withdrawal of American troops. That could risk the hijacking of Iraq by terrorist groups and former Ba'athists."

O.K., I have a simple question. Why, every time John Kerry opens his mouth, doesn't one of his staffers stuff something in it?

The guy couldn't be more disingenuous. He couldn't be more hypocritical. He's now embracing the very same policy he derided less than two years ago.

And going back to 1991, his record on Iraq looks like the printout from a Bill Clinton lie detector test.

Let's mark the scorecard.

He was against sending troops.

He was for sending troops.

He was against early withdrawal.

He's for early withdrawal .

Does anybody take this guy seriously?

He's always blathering about political expediency.

Who's he trying to kid? His record on Iraq closely matches the opinion polls.

John Kerry is the poster child for political expediency. [[In-content Ad]]