Nearly Onion-worthy: Nuance Confounds Locals.
Silly foreigners, mistaking American campaign rhetoric for the communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols. I kid Australians for getting all mad at each other trying to figure out exactly what John Kerry’s policy on Iraq is, but of course someone has to parse it somehow. Andrew Sullivan seems to have found an instance of thematic unity over time:
Senator, I will say this. I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist." - John F. Kerry, Congressional Testimony, April 22, 1971.
"I have always said from day one that the goal here . . . is a stable Iraq, not whether or not that's a full democracy. I can't tell you what it's going to be, but a stable Iraq. And that stability can take several different forms. - John F. Kerry, April 14, 2004.
It put me in mind of this “like father like son” TNR article a month or so back.