Politics

That's My Kooch!

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Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who won votes and love in relatively equal amounts back in 2004, is making a second run for the White House. This is a source of amusement to many. Kathryn Lopez:

Kucinich and his Dept. of Peace will have another go at the White House.

Oliver Willis:

Forget Obama, forget Hillary, forget them all… Dennis Kucinich is in the race.

Ann Althouse:

Dennis Kucinich! He's running for president!

Because he's Dennis Kucinich! And he exists! It practically writes itself!

Obviously, Kucinich is personally pretty goofy. (Start with this and keep googling.) But he's only running for president because he voted against the Iraq War and has a prescription for ending the conflict that's brutal in its simplicity: Get the hell out. Stop funding the war. And seriously, guys, get the hell out.

That's the kind of foreign policy frittery that disqualifies Kucinich from a presidential run, right? OK—use the space below to explain why that Iraq solution should be utterly dismissed while John McCain should be taken seriously. Here's Matt Welch:

McCain has been banging the drum from nearly Day One to put more boots on the ground in Iraq. "There are a lot of things that we can do to salvage this," he said on "Meet the Press" on Nov. 12, "but they all require the presence of additional troops." McCain is more inclined to start wars and increase troop levels than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. He has supported every U.S. military intervention of the last two decades, urged both presidents to rattle their sabers louder over North Korea and Iran, lamented the Pentagon's failure to intervene in Darfur and Rwanda and supported a general policy of "rogue state rollback." He's a fan of Roosevelt's Monroe-Doctrine-on-steroids stick-wielding in Latin America. And — like Bush — he thinks too much multilateralism can screw up a perfectly good war.

McCain's considered the man most likely to become the 44th president, and if you inverted Kucinich's ideas and said "come up with something just as stupid," you'd come up to something close to the McCain doctrine. Kucinich is a ridiculous character, but debating him is the price the two parties' leaders have to pay for being completely unserious about Iraq.