I can't make sense out of this

In a speech designed to recapture his momentum, John Kerry made the following curious comments.

"Let me tell you in no uncertain terms what makes someone unfit for office and unfit for duty," Mr. Kerry said, turning to Mr. Bush. "Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead our country. Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this country. Letting 45 million Americans go without health care for four years makes you unfit to lead this country.

"Letting the Saudi royal family control the price of oil for Americans makes you unfit to lead this country. Handing out billions of dollars in government contracts without a bid to Halliburton while you're still on the payroll makes you unfit lead this country.

Shouldn't he find a new speech writer?

He recently said he would have gone into Iraq even "knowing what we know now". How then could Bush have misled us into Iraq when Kerry would have gone in under the same circumstances? If Bush misled us, then wouldn't Kerry be misleading us as well? And why isn't the press asking these questions of Kerry? (Hopefully it doesn't escape my regular readers that I ask a lot of rhetorical questions. Heh...)

He claims Bush is "doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs" just hours before the Labor Department announces the unemployment rate has dropped to 5.4%, better than it was when Clinton left office. (As Tim Blair demonstrated way back in February the press has been using semantics to play this issue to Kerry's advantage for quite some time.)

Furthermore, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate has dropped steadily for the past six months, average hourly earnings have increased every month during the same period and both the consumer price index and the producer price index has dropped steadily. Isn't this good news?

While we're at it, maybe someone can explain this to me. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, (you have to go here and generate the report yourself) there are 114,737,000 people that have full time employment in the US, which is 1,532,000 more people that are working full time than were working full time when Clinton left office. So how is it that Bush has "[lost] millions of jobs"? Is it some sort of new math that I'm not familiar with?

(And if you can explain that maybe you're willing to take on this. The deficit increased every year Clinton was in office. So where did the budget surpluses go? I asked my CPA daughter with the double majors in accounting and economics and the cum laude degree, but she just shrugged her shoulders and said, "Don't ask me, Daddy!")

I'm not knowledgeable enough of the health care issue to comment on it. I've done some reading that says that the government isn't tracking the right information (small businesses, for example) and that a large chunk can be attributed to illegal immigrants (I won't get in to that), but I simply don't know the subject well enough to comment on it more than that.

Kerry claims Bush is "letting the Saudi royal family control the price of oil for Americans" when the lack of collusion between the two governments couldn't be more obvious in the price of gasoline.

He says "Handing out billions of dollars in government contracts without a bid to Halliburton while you're still on the payroll makes you unfit to lead" when Bush has never been on the payroll of Halliburton and Halliburton did bid for the contracts, in 2001.

The dissonance is incredible. I'm beginning to believe that there really are two Americas. The one that exists in the real world, and the one that exists in John Kerry's head.

UPDATE: Cori has more to say about Kerry's speech.