I love it when I’m in the beginning stages of writing a post and find out that someone else has already done all the research for me. In this case, the folks at FactCheck.org have cut through the bullshit behind George Bush’s new ad (which I parodied yesterday). The most deceitful thing about the John Kerry quotes from “Searching” is that, when taken in context, they illustrate Kerry’s consistency on Iraq. (emphasis added)

“It was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the President made the decision I supported him.”

Q: And Senator Kerry, the first question goes to you. On March 19th, President Bush ordered General Tommy Franks to execute the invasion of Iraq. Was that the right decision at the right time?

Kerry: George, I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the President made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him.

“The winning of the war was brilliant.”

Q: All this terrorism. If you were president, how would you stop it?

Kerry: Well, it’s going to take some time to stop it, Chris, but we have an enormous amount of cooperation to build one other countries. I think the administration is not done enough of the hard work of diplomacy, reaching out to nations, building the kind of support network.

I think they clearly have dropped the ball with respect to the first month in the after — winning the war. That winning of the war was brilliant and superb, and we all applaud our troops for doing what they did, but you’ve got to have the capacity to provide law and order on the streets and to provide the fundamentally services, and I believe American troops will be safer and America will pay less money if we have a broader coalition involved in that, including the United Nations.

“I have always said we may yet even find weapons of mass destruction.”

Q: But isn’t it, in a realistic political sense going to be a much harder case to make to voters when you have that extraordinary mug shot of Saddam Hussein…looking like he’s been dragged into a police line-up?

Kerry: Absolutely not, because I voted to hold Saddam Hussein accountable. I knew we had to hold him accountable. There’s never been a doubt about that. But I also know that if we had done this with a sufficient number of troops, if we had done this in a globalized way, if we had brought more people to the table, we might have caught Saddam Hussein sooner. We might have had less loss of life. We would be in a stronger position today with respect to what we’re doing.

Look, again, I repeat, Chris, I have always said we may yet even find weapons of mass destruction. I don’t know the answer to that. We will still have to do the job of rebuilding Iraq and resolving the problem between Shias and Sunnis and Kurds. There are still difficult steps ahead of us.

The question that Americans want to know is, what is the best way to proceed? Not what is the most lonely and single-track ideological way to proceed. I believe the best way to proceed is to bring other countries to the table, get some of our troops out of the target, begin to share the burden.

The last punch in the ad is Bush’s old standby “I actually did vote for the 87 billion…”. Yawn. Nevermind the fact that Bush opposed “funding our soldiers” during a war before he didn’t. If you actually read Kerry’s speech on the senate floor during the $87 billion debate, you’d see that his position then is consistent with everything he’s said for the last two years.

Ever since the Bush Administration began launching their “new product” in the fall of 2002, John Kerry has been steadfast in his position on the war. He believed the President’s promises that the Congressional resolution didn’t mean war was inevitable, that he wouldn’t rush to war without ample support from the international community, and that he’d let the weapons inspectors complete their work before deciding whether to invade. When Bush broke his promises to Congress and the American people, it was his position that changed, not John Kerry’s.