Iraq, Kerry and Nuance

Chris Andersen over at Interesting Times has a post, Bush: Kerry is at least as good as me where if asks if the alleged Kerry "flip flops" on Iraq can stick. Chris doesn't think so:

.....I think it is significant that the major defense offered by Bush is not that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea but that, if it was bad, then Kerry is equally culpable in the mistake.

That's going to be a tough sell. It requires us to believe that one Senator, saying yeah to a measure that gives the President the authority to go to the UN and put the squeeze on Saddam Hussein is equivalent to said President actually giving the "GO!" command to his generals in the field.

I think that Chris makes the same mistake many progressives, Democrats and moderate Republicans make, he overestimates the U.S. electorate. Americans have been dumbed down and infected with apathy by two generations of television. They have a couple of things in common with George W. Bush, they are intellectually incurious and they don't do nuance. Mr. Kerry's position on Iraq is certainly nuanced and requires some study if you are going to figure out that the Bush administration is lying about it. The fact is not many voters are going to do that and the corporate MSM is not going to help them. The bottom line then is, yes it can stick.
The one thing that the administration has the most trouble defending is the incompetence after the invasion. The voters can see that on TV, Republican Senators Hagel and Lugar openly say it on TV. The incompetence issue should have been the main issue from the beginning, not the invasion itself.