Why is John Kerry in such good shape to carry the frog vote in the upcoming election?


Kerry’s claim that unnamed foreign leaders have told him that they’re rooting for him to take down the cowboy should make him an object of ridicule.


But no. The Bush campaign–whose theme song seems to be ‘Sounds of Silence’–hasn’t seized upon this revealing boast.


Columnists Charles Krauthammer and James Lileks, however, have. They know why Kerry’s remark could bode ill for America. Lileks:


”Kerry’s remark sounds pathetically naive. Why does he think the Unnamed Foreign Leaders like him best — because they have America’s best interests at heart? They want to mire the United States in the tar pit of the United Nations again, and Kerry looks like the man to wade right in’.


‘Europe can’t fight its way out of a paper bag, because it spends half its money propping up its paper bag industry, and the other half on bureaucracies regulating the strength and thickness of paper bags. Europe can only be the equal of American power with the willing cooperation of a president who stays up late at night wondering whether chain-smoking leftists in cafes on another continent might greet his next state visit with giant mocking puppets.’


Krauthammer’s ‘Tripe a la Mode’ column parses an anti-American article in Le Monde by Jean-Marie Colombani, who also wrote the ‘We Are All Americans’ column after Sept. 11. What does it mean that he’s no longer an American?


It means, writes Krauthammer, ‘We like Americans when they are victims, on their knees bleeding. We just don’t like it when they get up off the floor’without checking with us first.’


You should read the whole column, but I can’t resist quoting one more nugget:


‘It’s not John Kerry’s fault that he is endorsed by a Frenchman. (Or by Kim Jong Il, whose media have been running some of Kerry’s speeches verbatim!) But Kerry has made the major’indeed only discernible’theme of his foreign policy ‘rejoining the community of nations’ and being liked abroad again.’