Like A Dog Being Washed

Note to self, if I ever run for office, get Hitchens on my side:

To begin with a small question that I trust is not a trivial or a petty one: how often have you met a self-described Kerry supporter? During the truncated and front-loaded Democratic primaries, it was relatively easy to encounter Dean enthusiasts, Gephardt union activists, Clark fans, Edwards converts, Kucinich militants and even dedicated Sharptonians. (My circle wasn't wide enough to encompass any Braun campaigners.) But a person who got up every morning and counted the day wasted if he or she hadn't made a Kerry convert? I've asked this question on radio and on television, and on campus and in the other places where people sing, and I've heard only a slight shuffling of Democratic feet. Just as the junior senator from Massachusetts used to say, for arcane fund-raising purposes, that he was only the ''presumptive'' nominee, so he was earlier the ''presumptive'' or last-resort choice once all the passion and spontaneity had been threshed out by the party machine. The name Kerry is thus another tired synonym for ABB, or ''Anybody but Bush.'' Shall we ''take America back'' this November? In such a case, we would be taking it back to a fairly familiar version of Democratic consensualism.
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Yet these books make it plain that Kerry is not a taller version of Mondale or Dukakis. This year's Democratic aspirant has a fascinating family history, extending not just to the earliest years of the ancestors of the Republic but to the yearnings of those later Europeans who sought refuge on this continent. (He must be the only Catholic Jew with Mayflower-Winthrop roots to have sought the highest office.)

...I had not known until I read these books that Kerry had had his first marriage annulled, signifying in effect that he was never wed to Julia Thorne, the mother of his children, in the first place. How odd that he would invoke one of the Roman Catholic Church's most pitiless dogmas while treating so many of its other teachings as essentially optional. The general effect he has striven to create is the opposite: that of a man who dislikes ruthlessness. After all, Kerry is against the death penalty, except in cases where the perpetrator has done something really heinous or unpopular. And he stopped saying ''Bring it on'' when he realized it made him sound ridiculous. But here may be the inescapable contradiction. When he voted against the MX missile and the Star Wars program, he was opposing the arms race and the implied ''first strike'' doctrine. But when he voted against the precision-guided weapons -- like the Apache helicopter and the Patriot missile -- that have helped make possible the relatively bloodless removal of aggressive despotisms, he was failing to see that the Pentagon, too, had assimilated some of the important lessons of Vietnam.
He still gives, to me at any rate, the impression of someone who sincerely wishes that this were not a time of war. When critical votes on the question come up, Kerry always looks like a dog being washed. John McCain was not like this, when a president he despised felt it necessary to go into Kosovo. We are looking at a man who would make, or would have made, a perfectly decent peacetime president.

This in a book review. Devastating.