William Salaten has a very excellent article on the RNC on Kerry on Iraq.
(via Kevin Drum and Joshua Marshall).

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has spliced together video clips in an effort to convince people that Kerry has flip flopped on Iraq. This effort is comically unsuccessful. Admirably Salaten confronts the evidence rather than glibly dismissing it.

I certainly wasn't surprised by the fact that the RNC distorted the meaning of Kerry's statements by editing out the context. However, the distortions seem to me to be extraordinarily shameless and blatant. In four cases Salaten makes the thrust of the quotes completely different by restoring words which were edited out. The striking thing is that he doesn't have to look far afield. In one case they are the two sentences which follow the edited sound bite, in the second one sentence after the sound bite, in a third the RNC cut Kerry in the middle of a sentence cutting from "in the sense that" on, and, in the fourth case, the deleted statements came between two bits which were spliced together. On the last case Salaten writes "The RNC deletes the next seven sentences, so that Kerry's next words appear to be," . That is, it seems that the splice was not indicated by the video equivilant of an ellipses, so the clip is, in effect, fraudulent. No real surprise here.

This all means that the RNC does not consider easily available proof that they are distorting meanings by removing context a problem at all. They seem to have guessed (sensibly) that few journalists would bother to check the presumably web available transcripts and that no one would have made a big fuss about their dishonesty. This is not a surprise either.

The stranger thing is that the RNC chose to include four clips in which Kerry states and restates the same position. This is very odd in a video which attempts to present him as a flip flopper.

The video seems to contain one deviation from the standard Kerry line on May 3 2003 (that is 2 days after "mission accomplished").

"I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity. But I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm [Saddam]."

The first sentence is a re-re-re-restatement of the standard position. The second is anodyne, since it doesn't say which means should be used to disarm Saddam Hussein. Amost but not quite everyone publically claimed to agree that it was necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein. I didn't and I don't think I am the only one, but I can't find many other examples. The third is a declaration of "support" which is not the same thing as agreement. A standard view is that even if we disagree about going to war we must support the troops and their commanders up to and including the commander in chief. I don't think Kerry really shares this view,having been rather hard on a commander in chief or two, but saying he supports the President surely is different from saying he would have done the same thing.

Oddly the RNC video makes me concerned about John Kerry for exactly the opposite reason than the one they present. He seems to have an almost Bush like fixation with consistency even in the face of changing circumstances including the change in administration.

Feb 22 1998
"I am personally prepared, if that's what it meant. I don't think you have to start there. I think there are a number of other options. But what I hear from the administration, thus far, is if he doesn't comply, then we will hit him. The obvious question is, after you've hit him, have you opened up your inspections?"

Aug 5 2004
"I voted to hold Saddam Hussein accountable, because had I been president, I would have wanted that authority, because that was the way to enforce the U.N. resolutions and be tough with the prospect of his development of weapons of mass destruction. … Now, might we have wound up going to war with Saddam Hussein? You bet we might have—after we exhausted those remedies and found that he wasn't complying, and so on and so forth."

6 years have passed and John Kerry has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He has kept his focus on the UN resolutions and inspections. He consistently supports the threat of an invasion and insists that it not be a bluff that can be called. It's not in the excerpts of quotes I posted, but Salaten correctly notes his persistent almost obsessive " calling for "heat," "inspections," "process," and cooperation with "allies.""

This is the standard establishment view clearly different from peacenics and neocon super hawks. The fact that it happens to be very different from my view makes it striking to me how little Kerry's thought evolved.
This is slightly worrying. It is not enough to make me prefer President Dean or (ugh) Gephart, but I would prefer a little better use of 6 years of new information.