Mark Steyn, on John Kerry’s absolutely revolting attack on Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi: Kerry’s looking for American failure — and he’s it.

Kerry didn’t show up for Allawi’s visit to Washington — he was in Ohio again, which is evidently becoming the proverbial Vietnam-type quagmire for him. Nonetheless, barely had the prime minister finished than the absentee senator did a daytime version of his midnight ramble and barged his way onto the air to insist that he knew better than Iraq’s head of government what was going on in the country. One question from his accompanying press corps was especially choice:

“Prime Minister Allawi told Congress today that democracy was taking hold in Iraq and that the terrorists there were on the defensive. Is he living in the same fantasyland as the president?”

It would be nice to think this was a somewhat crude attempt at irony, but given America’s Ratherized media this seems unlikely. Just for the record, Allawi is not living in a fantasyland. He’s living in Iraq, and he begins his day with a dangerous commute across Baghdad’s “Green Zone.” John Kerry’s regular commute, by contrast, is from his wife’s beach compound at Nantucket to his wife’s 15th century English barn reconstructed as a ski lodge in Idaho. Nonetheless, he’s the expert on Iraq and the guy living there 24/7 is the fantasist, and he’s happy to assure us the prime minister doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s all going to hell, forget about those January elections, etc.

What a small, graceless man Kerry is. The nature of adversarial politics in a democratic society makes George W. Bush his opponent. But it was entirely Kerry’s choice to expand the field, to put himself on the other side of Allawi and the Iraqi people. Given his frequent boasts that he knows how to reach out to America’s allies, it’s remarkable how often he feels the need to insult them: Britain, Australia, and now free Iraq. But, because this pampered cipher has floundered for 18 months to find any rationale for his candidacy other than his indestructible belief in his own indispensability, Kerry finds himself a month before the election with no platform to run on other than American defeat. He has decided to co-opt the jihadist death-cult, the Baathist dead-enders, the suicide bombers and other misfits and run as the candidate of American failure. This would be shameful if he weren’t so laughably inept at it.