John Kerry talks about the hurricane in Florida

For the better part of 18 months, John Kerry has bitterly denounced the Bush administration's,  Over and over he has pronounced his unsparing indictment: "George Bush has pursued the most arrogant, inept, reckless, and ideological HURRICANE policy in the modern history of this country."
 
    That is remarkably hostile language for a presidential challenger.  No major party candidate for the White House in modern times has so thoroughly abandoned the principle that politics stops at the water's edge.     
     
    Here is a representative excerpt from Kerry's replies:

    "We need a new president . . . to re-establish credibility with the rest of the world. . . . Here is the bottom line: Number one, you cannot bring other nations to the table through the back door.  You cannot have America run the recovery, make all the reconstruction decisions, make the decisions of the kind of government aid that will be needed, and pretend to bring other nations to the table.
 
     In effect, he's transferred to the US Government  the decision about what aid will go into Florida.  But he won't transfer to the UN the real authority for determining how the aid will be distributed. How we will do the reconstruction of Florida without the UN, Germany and France.. . . .
 
    "If I'm president, I will not only personally go to the UN, I will go to other capitals. . . . I will immediately reach out to other nations in a very different way from this administration.  I will return to the UN and I will literally, formally rejoin the community of nations and turn over a proud new chapter in America's relationship with the world."

    No matter how the question is put, Kerry's answers on hurricane damage  always boil down to a single recipe: Shrink the US role in Florida and defer to the United Nations instead.  That's it.  That is the sum and substance of his thinking about the hurricane damage in Florida.  He repeatedly declares Bush a failure for not kowtowing to the UN and vows that in a Kerry administration, the UN will be given the commanding role it deserves.
 
    Kerry has been talking this way for months.  In his speech on Hurricane damage at the Brookings Institution last fall, for example, he mentioned the UN no fewer than 25 times.  ("We need a new Security Council resolution to give the United Nations real authority.. This shift of authority from the United States to the United Nations is indispensable.")
 
    There is more of this UN fetish in Kerry's recent Washington Post column on hurricane damage.  "The United Nations, not the United States," he writes, "should be the primary civilian partner in working with Florida leaders to  restore government services, rebuild the economy, and recreate a sense of hope and optimism among the people in Florida."
Last week in a meeting with the UN food For Oil committee Kerry said "did you know Halliburton has a no-bid contract to provide drinking water and plastic sheeting."
And finally when When I'm President, hurricanes won't hit Florida.