I take it all back.

The John Edwards campaign didn’t “jump the shark,” as I suggested yesterday. It couldn’t have. That would mean that John Kerry is the de facto Democratic nominee for president. And he is really, really out in left field, as evidenced by a series of odd statements in the past couple of days about President Bush’s foreign policy.

Take this New York Daily News editorial-board meeting, for example. Kerry apparently told a gathering of editors and reporters at the tabloid that Bush had deliberately helped the rebels fighting against the Jean-Bertrande Aristide regime in Haiti in order to overthrow him. While stressing that he was not “a big Aristide fan,” Kerry suggested that he would never have allowed the situation to come to a head, that he would have used U.S. military force, unilaterally if necessary, to “come in” against the rebels. The Bush administration, on the other hand, “has empowered the insurgents, and they’ve done it quite purposely out of their dislike … for Aristide.”

Let me get this straight. When Bush was rebuffed by France, Germany, and the United Nations in his efforts to deal with a murderous tyrant in Iraq — an unpredictable man whose regime sponsored anti-American terrorism, whose containment was costing the United States millions of dollars a year with no end in sight, and who had at least the capacity to produce dangerous weapons — the president decided that a “coalition of the willing” including key allies such as Britain, Australia, and Poland would go in anyway. Their goal was to depose the dictator, bring freedom and constitutional government to the region, and ensure that Saddam Hussein’s weapons experts and materiel (such that it is or was) could not be used against America or its allies by either secular or Islamist terrorists.

This was a policy that Kerry (sort of) opposed.

But if the goal of U.S. military intervention had been purely “humanitarian” rather than self-interested, if it had been to keep rebels from overthrowing a murderous leftist demagogue installed by a previous American president, if it had been to prop up a socialist regime that had impoverished its citizens, and if there had been little to no national-security justification involved — all describing the senator’s proposed Haiti operation — Kerry would risk American lives to prop the thug up? And do so “unilaterally”?

This is, to put it simply, nuts. It is an entirely indefensible position, whether you agree with the Bush administration’s decisions on these matters or not. If this is the product of John Kerry’s experience, I’ll take some of John Edwards’ freshman antics, or George W. Bush’s sophomoric cowboy antics, or even a heavy dose of Dennis Kucinich sixth-year-senior pacifism. At least the latter would be consistent, perhaps vaguely noble.

But wait, that’s not all, as the knife salesman says. Kerry went on to allege that Bush had conspired to keep a nuclear disarmanent deal with Libya from becoming public last year, so that the president would derive maximum benefit from it. Apparently, the allegation is that Bush is both a devious crook, because he delayed the deal for political purposes, and an incompetent one, because he didn’t delay it farther into 2004 where it would have been far more valuable.

Super Tuesday has arrived. This is pretty much it as far as the Democratic campaign goes. Because I expect (for reasons unrelated to foreign policy) that the 2004 presidential race will be competitive, it is certainly conceivable that the Democratic nominee might be elected. Kerry has proved to be completely unprepared, perhaps dangerously unprepared, for the job. Will Democrats really choose to nominate this man?

It’s time for the Incredible Shrinking Candidate to grow back up — real quick.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.