How John Kerry Is Right

John Kerry’s latest:

"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 is arguing that because America has not enchained our economy as the environmentalists would like and has not massively increased our self-sacrifice for the rest of the world, we are hated by the world. The implication is that our foreign policy problems are caused by our lack of altruism.

Republicans might respond that Kerry is just part of the blame America crowd. Let me shock my readers by suggesting that Kerry is right in one respect. The “rhetoric and standards” of the Bush administration are compassionate conservatism. Bush does embraces the idea that America should sacrifice altruistically for the rest of the world. As the President just announced in his State of the Union speech,

To whom much is given, much is required. We hear the call to take on the challenges of hunger, and poverty, and disease — and that is precisely what America is doing.

As long as the American government accepts the morality of the Democrats, then America is hypocritical to the extent that we don’t commit suicide. If we had a president who offered different rhetoric and standards – one who rejected altruism and forthrightly stated that America has a right to exist without sacrificing for the rest of the world – then Kerry could wallow in his loathing of America and capitalism all he wanted, but he could not call us hypocritical.

Bush and the Republicans will never appease the blame America crowd by debasing America before the world and accepting the premise that we have a duty to help other nations. The Democrats will always find their efforts lacking in sacrifice and the Republicans will always be helpless before their arguments from morality. The Republicans help give moral legitimacy to those who would destroy America.