It's the usual suspects again!

John Podhoretz mostly gets it right in Kerry's New Woe

You might think the Abu Ghraib prison scandal would be helpful for John Kerry's presidential hopes. But the early indications - from the Gallup polling organization - suggest yet again that President Bush's problems are not doing much to boost Kerry's standing.

Indeed, it's possible that the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib might push more than a few hundred thousand potential Kerry voters in a direction that would be disastrous for the Democratic nominee - toward Ralph Nader.

I'm not talking here about mainstream Democrats or holders of conventional liberal opinion. I'm talking about genuine, unapologetic leftists - the sort that see the United States as the key source of the world's woes and view capitalism as a dangerous and noxious force.

You mean like the Democrat Congressional leadership and the big media fuzzbrains?

The Abu Ghraib photos offer these American leftists the perfect psychological opportunity they need to fly off the political rails. They've been hungering for it ever since the run-up to the war in Iraq.

To the extent that these people vote Democratic, they do so grudgingly and with some measure of unhappiness, because they do not think that the Democratic Party is a true party of the Left. They think both parties are in the pocket of corporate interests.

And they're working to turn the Democrat party into the true party of the "Left".

Who are these people? They are the folks who demonstrated across the country before the Iraq war. They show up to riot whenever the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund hold meetings. Their idea of an American Idol is Michael Moore.

The fat crapsack who just got caught in another lie?

Yes, they hate Bush with a consuming passion. But the truth is that they hate the United States of America more. They find the war in Iraq loathsome not because they are pacifists, but because the idea that America is a liberator nation sickens and enrages them.

And that's why Abu Ghraib might be John Kerry's worst nightmare: The anti-American Left is already seizing on these photos and the behavior of .001 percent of the Americans present in Iraq as evidence that the entire U.S. effort in Iraq is a moral catastrophe from stem to stern.

The issue will no longer be the supposed "lies" of George W. Bush, but the supposedly "criminal" conduct of the American occupiers. In other words, they will openly turn from blaming Bush to blaming American troops, American soldiers, American contractors - and America herself.

What's the problem? John Kerry is a past master of this schtick. Ever listen to his Senate testimony as lead VVAW monkey boy?

Such people will not be mollified by the stance of the Kerry campaign, which is that the stated goal of the United States in Iraq will remain in force in a Kerry administration. Kerry also says he wants to stay until the job is done - to achieve a stable, functioning representative government. He wants to use other means and other strategies, but he still wants the same outcome.

If his lips are moving, he's lying. But it will be interesting to see if ole Lurch can resist his old instincts or starts baying at the moon with the rest of the pond scum.