The Credibility Gap: Viking Pundit has been the gadfly on John Kerry's campaign. (And why not? Kerry's his senator after all -- though not by his choice, I'm sure.) Here he manages a mini-fisking of Kerry's typically bland rhetoric on energy policy. I'd excerpt, but it's really unexcerptable, mostly because Kerry's reasoning is so fatuous and in need of commentary.

I think a reasonable reader would agree that I am a practical green, but the arguments against ANWR just never appeal to me on a plain ol' cost-benefit level. We're not going to nuke the tundra; we can be pumping crude in a lot less than 20 years; and, as the Viking suggests, we need a more balanced energy policy than "Let's invent new technology!" What's the hold-up?

Sidebar: Razor rightly whacked me last week for being harder on Kerry than on the other Dems running for the nomination. I plead guilty. . . but with mitigating circumstances! He is, after all, my senator too. I ask Razor to engage in a small thought experiment here, in which he will successfully integrate, mentally, the following items:

1. Rick Santorum

2. President of the United States of America

That's roughly the equivalent of electoral horror for a voting Democrat from Pennsylvania, I reckon.