Kerry's Speech – Instathoughts

I served in Vietnam….

The opening of the speech was just lame… “My name is John Kerry, reporting for duty”… Arghhh, pulleeezzee…

This whole positive spin thing was a ruse – all the read meat was saved for Kerry. The examples are too numerous to list.

Stupidest Line Of The Night – “We will tell the terrorists, we will win, you will lose.” – Damn, we should have tried that earlier. I’m sure those who devote their life to destroying us will gladly surrender if you ask nicely.

Best Line Of The Night – The rant on stem cell research. It’s a bit of red herring, but the left (and a lot of the right) loves that issue.

Quick quiz – What’s Kerry been doing for the last 19 years? If record of accomplishments seems to have stopped with his three months of in theater service in Vietnam.

Initial Spin – All in all the speech was good, not great. For Kerry it is probably as good a performance as he is capable of, so in that sense it’s a smashing success (by not being a failure). He played often to the delegates Bush hatred. He hammered Vietnam service over and over and over again which seemed to have been his play to moderates. His Senate career ranks below Vietnam, and his Asst. Prosecutor days in number of speech references.

I think my wife might have summed it up best – It was a prime time version of a Dr. Phil speech, long on sloganish speech that leaves you scratching your head later.

Update: Fellow RNC blogger Ed Morrissey was live blogging the speech. Stephen Green was live blogging too (multiple posts). Glenn Reynolds is taking comments. Steven Taylor notes several cases of pilfering from other famous texts.