Stand-up Guy: The noble, thoughtful, courageous John Kerry is knocking 'em dead in Iowa:

The greatest position of strength is by exercising the best judgement in the pursuit of diplomacy, not in some trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted, but in a genuine coalition.

(Thanks to Instapundit for the link. Good god, that man reads a lot of newspapers!) I never had any respect for Kerry, but I think we're at the point now where we might have to do some adjective replacement therapy. I used to think that John Kerry was slippery and an opportunist. In the last six months I've come to believe that he is an unprincipled swindler with nothing behind his run for the presidency but narcissism. I think he is now pushing on the rest of the country the political snake oil (Kerry's Genuine Diplomatic Cure-All!) that we've seen here in the People's Republic. I think, too, that he truly believes that he's a Voice of Moral Authority in foreign policy because he went to Vietnam. Some people say that's just his political strategy, but I'm becoming more convinced that he really believes his own bullshit.

There's an old joke about a two-time divorcee that puts me in mind of what's shaping up to be Kerry's campaign. First she married a Republican, then later married a Democrat. Her friend asked how the sex was. With the Republican, she said, it was plain vanilla -- boring and not very intersting. And the Democrat? Well, she said, we never actually had sex. We just sat on the bed while he told me how great it was going to be.