Fred Kaplan offered an incredibly biased and slanted whitewash ("John Kerry's Defense Defense") of Kerry's record in Microsoft's online magazine Slate, mainly based around the fact that Bush the Elder and his staff had also made sweeping cuts in the defense budget, but his argument is fallacious on at least two grounds:

1) George H.W. Bush and his staff were probably wrong to slash the defense budget as much as they did, but that doesn't excuse Kerry at all. John Kerry isn't running against George H.W. Bush, but his son, George W. Bush.

2) Even if Kaplan's assertions were true (they mostly aren't, but let's say they are for the sake of argument), there is no evidence in the voting record of John Kerry ever acting to buttress or improve our national defense while in the Senate.

Kerry even went as far as to claim that Communism was not a threat to America, even though as he spoke (the mid-1980s) thousands of Soviet missiles were pointed at us, the Soviets were paying, funding, equipping and training terrorists, arming and training to invade Western Europe, and they had violated the biological weapons protocol, operating a mammoth BW research and production program, making tons of weaponized smallpox and plague which they planned to drop on us with their ICBMs. According to Dr. Ken Alibek, deputy director of the Soviet (and later the Russian) bioweapons development and production agency Biopreparat, that lovable tree-hugging palooka Gorbachev personally signed the order for the biological missile warhead project.

George W. Bush has striven valiantly to patch the gaping holes in our defense capability made by 12 years of neglect and, in some cases, purposeful destruction, not only by his father but Bill Clinton and the disastrous Democratic majority Congress of the early 1990s - with John Kerry in there plugging for more and deeper defense cuts and weapon system cancellations.

It takes a lot of nerve for John Kerry, a willing participant in this vandalism of our armed services throughout his career, to gripe about the current President "invading on the cheap" when much of that is because Kerry and his fellow Congressional liberals did so much to pauper the Department of Defense.

Not only is John Kerry NOT the most qualified man to defend our country, he isn't even remotely qualified for the job at all. All he's ever done as a Senator is to try to weaken our armed forces. Many millions of American men and women understand the vital importance of a strong military - a concept most often attributed to Vegetius, the Roman student of military science whose book on the subject educated men of arms throughout Europe for centuries. Any of these people is more qualified to be commander-in-chief of our armed forces than John Kerry, whose career shows his total lack of comprehension of Vegetius' simple rule: "If you would have peace, prepare for war."

Finally, reports of Kerry's demeanor in Massachusetts show a pattern of narcissistic and abusive behavior toward mere taxpayers that many Americans in and out of the Armed Forces would find incompatible with being the Commander-in-Chief of the United States' military. Will having the power that comes with the Presidency turn Kerry into a 21st century dictator, a Boston brahmin-ized Huey Long? Let's try not to find out, shall we?