Sunday, January 28, 2007

Kerry calls the United States an International Pariah

John Kerry Slams His Own Country At Davos

Here’s John Kerry speaking while sitting just a few feet away from Mohammad Khatami, the former President of the Iranian terror state.

Kerry was asked about whether the U.S. government had failed to adequately engage Iran’s government before the election of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005.

Kerry said the Bush administration has failed in addressing a number of foreign policy issues.

“When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don’t advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy,” Kerry said.

“So we have a crisis of confidence in the Middle East — in the world, really. I’ve never seen our country as isolated, as much as a sort of international pariah for a number of reasons as it is today.”…

Kerry criticized what he called the “unfortunate habit” of Americans to see the world “exclusively through an American lens.”

The Bush administration walked away from Kyoto? Methinks the Senator is revising history:

On July 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized (although it had been fully negotiated, and a penultimate draft was finished), the U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95–0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or “would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States”. On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Both Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman indicated that the protocol would not be acted upon in the Senate until there was participation by the developing nations. The Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification. . . .

The current President, George W. Bush, has indicated that he does not intend to submit the treaty for ratification, not because he does not support the Kyoto principles, but because of the exemption granted to China (the world’s second largest emitter of carbon dioxide). Bush also opposes the treaty because of the strain he believes the treaty would put on the economy; he emphasizes the uncertainties which he asserts are present in the climate change issue.

It was a unanimous Senate (with five abstainers) as well as the Clinton administration who walked away from Kyoto. The current administration walked away from Kyoto as well, but for the same reasons as the Clinton administration. Kerry himself, in fact, voted for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution to keep us out of Kyoto. Yet here he is now, a decade later, dishonestly accusing the current administration of isolating this country from the world on an issue like Kyoto that Kerry himself opposed for the very same reasons the Bush administration opposes it.

Why should we believe anything that comes out of this guy’s mouth? It’s bad enough that he’s sitting next to one of America’s enemies bad mouthing his own country, but he’s flat-out lying in what he’s saying as well.

Oh, and stopping off to give an autograph to a guy who supports executing gays for being gay is a real nice touch. But don’t expect any of the gay rights groups to hold Kerry accountable for that, though.

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If you have a really strong stomach, you can watch the video here.