CBS News had no problem outlining ten major flip-flops by Bush (although they didn’t have room for a few of the big ones, like wanting bin Laden “dead or alive,” and then three months later not caring where he was), but their list of Kerry’s “flip-flops” fell drastically short of being true. Look at the “top three” from that list:

Senate’s Role In Wars With Iraq

Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in January 1991, Kerry … said on the Senate floor, “It is a vote about war because whether or not the president exercises his power, we will have no further say after this vote.” … In October 2002, he supported the current war in Iraq, despite the fact that Iraq took no aggressive action against its neighbors.

In announcing his candidacy for president, in September 2003, he said his October 2002 vote was simply “to threaten” the use of force, apparently backtracking from his belief in 1991 that such a vote would grant the president an open-ended ticket to wage war.

This analysis disregards the fact that Kerry also stated on the Senate floor in 2002 that he voted to grant powers on the promise Bush made to first send inspectors and then garner a true international coalition, and it was only necessary to grant open-ended powers so that Bush would have the clout to carry out his promise. Bush had been the one to say it would be used “to threaten” Hussein. Kerry did not flip-flop on this one, Bush did.

If I Knew Then What I Know Now…

“We should not have gone to war knowing the information that we know today,” Kerry said Wednesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “Knowing there was no imminent threat to America, knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction, knowing there was no connection of Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda, I would not have gone to war. That’s plain and simple.”

But on Aug. 9, 2004, when asked if he would still have gone to war knowing Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, Kerry said: “Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have.” Speaking to reporters at the edge of the Grand Canyon, he added: “[Although] I would have done this very differently from the way President Bush has.”

The Kerry campaign says voting to authorize the war in Iraq is different from deciding diplomacy has failed and waging war. But Kerry’s nuanced position has contradicted itself on whether it was right or wrong to wage the war.

This is a bizarre analysis–it only seems contradictory if you try hard to misinterpret, or only pay attention to the first few words of sentences. Kerry’s stand was consistent: he would have voted to give the authority to the president as a way to force inspections, and believes now just as he did then that it was right to do that. He has also remained consistent in saying that going to war without letting diplomacy do its work is the wrong thing. Where’s the contradiction? There’s just no flip-flop here, just an apparent flip-flop generated by spin, not reality.

The $87 Billion Vote

In September 2003, Kerry implied that voting against wartime funding bills was equivalent to abandoning the troops. … Then, in October 2003, a year after voting to support the use of force in Iraq, Kerry voted against an $87 billion supplemental funding bill for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He did support an alternative bill that funded the $87 billion by cutting some of President Bush’s tax cuts.

But when it was apparent the alternative bill would not pass, he decided to go on record as not supporting the legislation to fund soldiers.

That’s a flip-flop? By not switching sides when the vote count looks bad? CBS is claiming that Kerry flip-flopped here … because he didn’t flip-flop! On this one, Kerry stood by his convictions; that his favored bill didn’t pass did not mean that he voted against funding. By the words of the CBS analysis, Kerry knew that the soldiers would receive funding anyway–so how was he abandoning the troops? Incredible.

Really, the list reflects more the spin put out by the Bush administration than the actual truth of the matter. I can only surmise that the writer, finding no significant flip-flops from Kerry, had no choice but to use the GOP spin in lieu of actual flip-flops in order to seem balanced, producing top-ten lists for both candidates.