Yep, the cat’s out of the proverbial bag, just to throw another clichéd metaphor at ya:

”We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” the (NYT Magazine – ed.) article states as the Massachusetts senator’s reply.

”As a former law enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

And that ought to just about do it for Frenchy. The Repubs are hammering at the “nuisance” angle, as is Michele, and well they might, too. But for me, the telling phrase — the first raw, unscripted look at the unexpurgated Kerry we’ve had all year — is this line: “We have to get back to the place we were.” That sums everything up so completely I hate to even sully its clear, gleaming perfection with further musing on it. But this is my damned website, and I’m by God gonna.

Kerry’s handlers, most likely wielding whips and chairs by now to keep the egomaniacal, haughty snob’s snarling rage at whichever underling he chooses to blame for this incredible gaffe under some kind of control, are already whining about this remark being taken “out of context” before drifting off to Loon Land on yet another murky cloud of blah-blah about diplomacy and allies. But it’s too late; the toothpaste ain’t going back in the tube.

Kerry and most of the rest of the Dems have absolutely no clue about how to win the WoT, and there’s a reason for that: it’s because they can’t accept that we’re in a war in the first place. They think it much more productive to spend their waking (!) hours yearning for those halcyon days of Camelot 2, back when the biggest perceived threat to the Republic was the unseemly stink raised over our Lord and Savior Bill getting his pipes cleaned by low-level employees in the Oval Office in exchange for jobs and security clearances.

But 9/11 caught them flatfooted — hell, it caught us all flatfooted, really. The difference is, though, that most of us woke up from the pleasant dream of a virtually-impregnable Fortress America the instant the second plane hit, to several somber realizations: that in order to have a secure nation, we need to actually invest in security and not indulge ourselves in any of those politically-correct We Are The World delusions that the Dems so enjoy; that a strong nation requires a strong military, and that the personnel thereof should be honored and appreciated for the job they do and not reviled as some wholly alien blood-lusting Other that decent people might merely tolerate at arm’s length while holding their collective noses; that the years of smearing America as the root of the world’s evil were misspent, and that a reckoning was overdue; that some enemies cannot be bargained with, ever; that years of failing to respond adequately to attack after attack had only netted us more and more-spectacular attacks.

No, the Dems preferred to remain asleep, dreaming the old sweet, untroubled dreams of their Lefty utopia. But the Islamists nailed us good, and a lot of our fellow Americans died horribly and unjustly, and our economy was severely damaged by it, and many of the societal ills Kerry and the Dems complain about now just don’t seem quite as important as they used to. Really, who can blame Kerry for so plaintively fretting about “getting back to the place we were” — who can blame anybody? We’d all love to go back to sleep, I’m sure. But we can’t, because there’s a very real monster under the bed who’s been there for years now, and he’s just waiting for us to turn off the light.

As Michele says:

This, in a nutshell, is why I could never even think about giving my vote to John Kerry and why I will vote for George Bush.

This, in a nutshell, is why I can’t imagine how anybody could think about voting for the 9/10 Democrats – at least until they join the rest of us in waking up to the 9/11 world.