John Kerry was in Davos, Switzerland last week speaking to an international audience, and took the opportunity to fire a few shots at Bush.

"When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy," Kerry said.

Captain Ed counters [1]:

Once again, we have the spectre of Kyoto haunting the Bush administration, when it was the Clinton administration that refused to submit the treaty to the Senate -- and the Senate that unanimously passed a resolution saying they'd never ratify it. The Byrd-Hagel Resolution in 1997 made it clear that the US would not allow itself to be bound by the treaty as long as it exempted India, China, and other developing nations. That's the same position as the Bush Administration has taken -- and the same position that John Kerry himself took in 1997 when he voted in favor of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution.

That's yet another example of the hypocrisy of John Kerry -- but there's more.

He took the time to scold the Bush administration for its lack of effort on AIDS and other diseases in Africa. However, Bush has already spent more on these issues than the last Democratic administration did in eight years. Humanitarian aid to Africa comprised $1.4 billion a year at the end of the Clinton administration, but Bush has tripled that to $4 billion per year -- and wants to more than double it over the next two years:

Not only is Kerry hypocritical here, he's frankly incompetent. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Bush. He has eroded civil liberties even beyond what might be considered necessary in wartime. He used gay marriage and the promise of a marriage amendment to the Constitution to win votes (and then dropped the amendment once the election was over). His habit of picking political cronies for appointments gave us the incompetent Michael Brown at FEMA during one of the worst civil disasters in history. He fumbled badly in nominating the unqualified but sycophantic Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

Even conservatives have legitimate beefs with Bush. He has no comprehensive immigration policy. Millions of people can walk across our border unannounced, yet INS stonewalls and quota limits doctors, engineers, scientists, and programmers who want to immigrate here. He hasn't prosecuted the war as effectively as he could have, and has taken a long time in addressing Iran's role in turning Iraq into a proxy U.S.-Iran war. He's also been the opposite of a small-government conservative - increasing the size of the Federal budget and creating a new Medicare prescription drug plan that creates a new intergenerational liability without raising Federal revenues a cent to fund it.

Of course, bumbling Kerry couldn't field any of those legitimate complaints. He had to pick two issues where Bush was either no worse than his predecessor or was significantly better, and on Kyoto Kerry himself voted against U.S. ratification before Bush ever stepped into office. One thing you can say about a second Bush administration is that it's no worse than a first Kerry administration would have been.