Halpern is angry 

Halpern is angry

Mark Halpern, the Republican novelist who did some speechwriting for Bob Dole in 1996, is angry at both parties, and their leaders, in this election. (Via Hit and Run).

There are lots of choice passages--Kerry understands his words but doesn't believe them; Bush believes but doesn't understand. Bush could have pursued a strategy of lightning strikes, as needed, in different countries, to persuade regimes to get rid of terrorists; instead he has become bogged down in Iraq.

Halpern is convinced there really is a clash of civilizations under way, and the U.S. needs more military spending, and more homeland defence, to wage this war. On the whole he probably has even more contempt for Kerry than for Bush.

Three years on, that is where we stand: our strategy shiftless, reactive, irrelevantly grandiose; our war aims undefined; our preparations insufficient; our civil defense neglected; our polity divided into support for either a hapless and incompetent administration that in a parliamentary system would have been turned out long ago, or an opposition so used to appeasement of America's rivals, critics, and enemies that they cannot even do a credible job of pretending to be resolute.