Can We Afford This?
The excellent Donald Lambro reports in last Tuesday's Washington Times on the National Taxpayers Union's look at "John Kerry's Legislative Priorities: 1991-2004" though at the moment, I don't have a link to his article. And it seems that the Times only has a 7 day free archive so it behooves me to just type in what I want from the article. Unless, of course, it were in the (sarcasm) "Creative Commons" (/sarcasm).
The Times headline is "Kerry backed costly legislation." As much of a "duh moment" as that is, it is quite useful to have explcit evidence of just what the Poodle's economic record is. The record, I hasten to emphasize, he is not running on. Lambro:

Legislation that Sen. John Kerry has proposed would have increased federal nondefense spending by an average of nearly $75 billion for each Congress, according to a tabulation of bills the lawmaker from Massachusetts has offered since 1991.

I heard one of the demobots - probably MacAuliffe - respond to a question about Kerry's plan for Social Security that Kerry would bring back Bill Clinton's balanced budgets and that would be the salvation of FDR's Ponzi scheme. Oh fer lying through yer teeth! First, the budget "surpluses" of the Clinton years were not surpluses. If Social Security taxes had been taken from the government and locked up (now where did I put those boxes!), there would have been just smaller deficits throughout the entirety of the Clinton administration. Secondly, if it had been up to Clinton, per se, those deficits would have been hugely greater. The only good the Republican congress did was force a reduction in real deficit spending. But this isn't about Clinton as much as Clintonoid MacAuliffe would like it to be.
This is about Kerry and Kerry is (wait for it!) an absolutely stereotypical tax-and-spend ultra-liberal. Don't get me wrong - I don't care for the current president's excessive spending. It buys him no goodwill with the left (Senator Hindenburg) and the deficit it adds to is not a good thing. But the fact remains that as bad as Bush is in spending, Kerry is just so much worse. And he can't be counted on to support national defense.
Here is the NTU on Kerry's spending from the Lambro article:

• "During that same period (since 1991), he was proposing legislation which, on average, would cut defense and homeland security spending by $101 million" for each Congress.
• Mr. Kerry "proposed either no increases or a decrease in defense spending in four of the last seven Congresses."
• Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Mr. Kerry has "proposed $84 in increased nondenfense spending for every dollar of defense spending increases that he has sponsored or co-sponsored."
  

This is the very nut of the problem. We are at war. The single most necessary thing on which to expend our national treasure is the defense of the United States. Homeland security spending should be rational - I'm as against waste, fraud and abuse as the next blogger. But our defense spending has been in retreat since the Reagan years. And we just can't count on Kerry to support it. But he will spend your tax money! Count on that.
There is one final argument I have against Kerry. He seems to think that the war on terror is not a military one. It is one run on law, reaction and intelligence. Taking those points seriatim, law is not sufficient to handle the depredations of those set against Western civilization. Jails will not hold those who blow up the courthouses and temples of commerce. Reaction is the road to our demise. The only way to defeat supra-state organized terrorists is to find where they are given sanctuary and destroy them before they bring the terror to the civilian population. Finally, one thing he's right about: intelligence. We will only win this war with better intelligence than we even now have.
Yet Kerry "did propose S.1826 ... which included a $1-billion cut in 1994. That measure also would have frozen intelligence spending at that reduced level through 1998, allowing it to rise only by the rate of inflation. That could fairly be called a $5-billion cut spread over five years." (source: factcheck.org) The justly-criticized intelligence failures that led to the maligned WMD-based decision to take down Saddam came from an intelligence service that Kerry would have given even fewer resources. And one aspect of intelligence that I have seen little discussed is why should President Bush be called to account for the failures of a CIA that was in the hands of the Clinton Adminstration until mere months before the 9/11 attacks?