And now, some baldfaced political advocacy

[mmcirvin]

You say you don't have any good reasons to vote for John Kerry, as opposed to just voting against George W. Bush?

Well, for one, there's BCCI. At the time I remember thinking this was an incredibly murky and difficult-to-follow story, maybe vaguely connected to the Iran-contra scandal. The gist of it, though, is that there was a bank with an explicitly anti-Western agenda that was money-laundering for terrorists, drug runners and tyrants the world over; and, against heavy opposition, Kerry led the 1989-1991 investigation that busted it wide open. We're better at fighting terrorist organizations because of it, and they would have been incalculably better off had it not happened.

Actually, I find it odd that this isn't a centerpiece of Kerry's campaign. It's pretty much his greatest achievement as a senator, in my opinion, and especially relevant to today's world. His strategists may figure that the details of dismantling a criminal financial web don't make a good story, or sound wimpy when compared to fighting two wars. But, really, operations like the BCCI investigation are crucial to the sort of next-generation "netwar" that everyone was talking about in late 2001 as the right way to fight decentralized, often stateless terrorist organizations. You find their sources of money and shut them down.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The "waffle king" persona is mostly the picture drawn by a coordinated smear campaign, just like "Al Gore the serial liar". Granted, they did get the opening because of Kerry's vote on the Iraq war resolution; there he basically walked into a political trap, along with many other people, and, image-conscious calculator that he is, he's been trying ever since to figure out how to portray this as a logically consistent decision.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Seriously, i have no idea where this waffle king thing got started. Clinton, he was good with the waffle. Kerry? C'mon.