Kerry: U.S. Has Become ‘International Pariah’

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry slammed the foreign policy of the Bush administration on Saturday, saying it has caused the United States to become “a sort of international pariah.”

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.”

Allahpundit:

He said this while seated next to the former CEO of one of the world’s foremost terrorist states, which as we speak is working on building nuclear weapons, bankrolling Hezbollah’s efforts to foment civil war in Lebanon and Hamas’s exterminationist jihad against Israel, and supplying Shiite militias with IEDs to kill American soldiers in Iraq. Whose current leadership, lest we forget, Kerry has previously signaled a desire to meet with. Note the bolded bit in the quote, too: given a direct choice between defending the president or siding with the Iranian government circa 2003 — whose nominal leader was, of course, Khatami himself — Lurch essentially chose the latter.

Then he signed an autograph for the pig. The same pig who, six months ago, defended executing gays for the crime of homosexuality.

Captain Ed:

Once again, we have the spectre of Kyoto haunting the Bush administration, when it was the Clinton administration that refused to submit the treaty to the Senate — and the Senate that unanimously passed a resolution saying they’d never ratify it. The Byrd-Hagel Resolution in 1997 made it clear that the US would not allow itself to be bound by the treaty as long as it exempted India, China, and other developing nations. That’s the same position as the Bush Administration has taken — and the same position that John Kerry himself took in 1997 when he voted in favor of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution.

That’s yet another example of the hypocrisy of John Kerry — but there’s more.

He took the time to scold the Bush administration for its lack of effort on AIDS and other diseases in Africa. However, Bush has already spent more on these issues than the last Democratic administration did in eight years. Humanitarian aid to Africa comprised $1.4 billion a year at the end of the Clinton administration, but Bush has tripled that to $4 billion per year — and wants to more than double it over the next two years

Glenn Reynolds sums Kerry up in his link back to this post: “Like Jimmy Carter, he’ll never forgive America for rejecting him, and he’ll console himself with the approval of America’s enemies.”

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