There’s one particular bit of political rhetoric that has been repeated so often that it’s becoming a “fact”, and I’m tired of it. This morning I had to hear Cokie Roberts repeating it on NPR, just as matter-of-factly as if she were talking about gravity, or breathing air. It is that John Kerry “can’t give a straight answer” to the question of the war in Iraq, that he’s “tried to make a virtue out fact that he’s nuanced, but on this case he seems to be all over the place” on his position. The Bush campaign has been working hard to reinforce this idea, having already implanted it in the first place several months ago. I’m just so tired of hearing it.

Here’s what a politico-blogger, Bob Somersby, wrote, as I might have liked to:

What is Kerry’s stand on Iraq? Readers, get ready for some real brain-work! Here goes: Kerry says Bush should have had the authority to go to war, but then went to war prematurely. Wow! Have you finished scratching your heads about all the nuance involved in that statement?

Remember way back when, when the President was still pretending he hadn’t already decided to attack, when we, along with the UN, were supposedly trying to get more weapons inspections in Iraq? (Remember back when we believed in “evidence” and “proof”, not just assertion, suspicions and estimates?) Remember the Bush Administration arguing that they needed the support of the Congress to pressure Iraq for more inspections, and to get UN support?

Imagine a world where, using the weight of such a resolution, a President worked to get actual inspectors on the ground to prove, or disprove, suspicions about WMDs, BEFORE we started shipping troops. IAEA inspections had already managed to give us a good picture of the state of Iraqi nuclear weaponry. Golly, if Mr. Bush had actually used the resolution Kerry voted for in the way the administration claimed he would, we might have saved billions of dollars, and nearly a thousand soldiers’ lives, by discovering there were NO WMDs in advance! Or, actually discovered weapons, if they existed, which would have meant the whole world, even the French, would have piled on, and we might have been able to “split the check”. (Would that have been being too “sensitive?”)

Kerry has been making this argument, clumsily, for months, as you can see if you go back over his statements. This whole “he’s all over the map” and “can’t give a straight answer” riff is fiction. And I’m really, really tired of hearing it from people who ought to know better, and could, if they bothered to pay attention. It’s just not that hard to get. I just wish that Kerry spoke as plainly as Bob Somersby writes. It would help in the battle-of-the-sound-bite-stars that seems to pass for news these days. (Though even Kerry’s actual statements are not all that hard to understand, if you actually look at what was said, not what someone said he said. And I’m a little bit bewildered by the suggestion that grammatical sentences, even long ones, are harder to understand than Bushisms, or rants about some negotiating with Al Qaeda.)

Now, my personal opinion is that it was clear at the time that Bush was insincere in asking for a Congressional vote. I thought it was obvious that he would go ahead and use any such vote to go straight to war, not passing GO (or the UN), and not collecting $200 billion in world support. I fault Kerry for going along with the crowd, and giving him the ability to do so.

But the story has been straight on this for some time. I just wish the press would start reporting it and stop doing the Bush campaign’s work for it.