Ask most veterans who are not ideological about Kerry winning so many medals in 4 months and they're likely to tell you that something fishy is going on. Particularly since Kerry wasn't in intense combat.  And some of his purple hearts (2 of them) were band-aid level wounds.

My grandfather won a silver star in World War II.  To win it, he had to travel behind enemy lines for great lengths of time under a great deal of hostile fire to locate enemy positions and report them back to his commanders.  He was nominated by his commanding officer for his repeated bravery.

Kerry, by contrast, was not really ever shot at directly and nominated himself. Many veterans find that offensive.

Why is it that the party of "smaller government" supports a man who has increased the bureaucracy of the federal government more than anyone else? Why is it the party that derides democrats as spend happy liberals supports a man who has signed every spending bill put before him?

Lesser of two evils there. 

Why is it that when Bill Clinton started trying to do something about Afghanistan he was accused of "wagging the dog" to distract the media from Monica Lewinsky? Don't you think if the nation had rallied around Clinton then, more than just a few cruise missiles being fired could have happened?

Maybe because it happened to take place days after the Monica Lewinski hearing and was so obviously ineffective and half hearted. It looked as if it was designed to eat up a couple of news cycles.

Why is John Kerry derided as a flip flopper for his $87 million dollar gaffe, but Bush is considered a steadfast president despite having changed positions on: the Department of Homeland security, the 9/11 commission, allowing Condi Rice to testify before said commission, appointing an intelligence director, claiming he was against nation building in 2000, claiming he wouldn't dip into Social Security in 2000, etc? If you can point to these decisions and say that it was good that Bush changed his mind, then can't you say that at least some of the time it was okay for Senator Kerry to have changed his mind?

I don't accept the premise of your question. John Kerry isn't a flip flopper simply because of that. John Kerry is a flip flopper because he has a career long record of being a political opportunist. There are examples where in the span of hours he would tell one constinuent who supported the 1991 Gulf war that he was a strong supporter of that and then turn around and tell another constituent who opposed the war that he too opposed the war.

Moreover, Bush comes across as someone who became convinced of the need for Homeland security through reasoned arguments.  Kerry almost assuredly voted against the $87 billion because he was losing to Howard Dean at the time.  Kerry also was a strong supporter of the Patriot act...and then says he opposes it.  Kerry votes for no child left behind...and then opposes it.  The list goes on and on.  And the thing is, his position on a given issue will depend on who he is talking about.  I remember in one of the debates Kerry saying he was pro-life personally but pro-choice politically. Talk about wanting to have it both ways.  You either thing a fetus is a human being and hence abortion is a murder or you don't. I happen to not think first trimester abortion to be murder which is why I'm pro-choice.  If Kerry really thinks it's murder, as he implied, but is still pro-choice then that's pretty disgusting.

Why are mass graves in Iraq so important, but larger numbers of people killed in Sudan are less important? Can't you admit that Iraqi oil at least makes this human rights mission a bit more palatable?

I don't accept your premise. Conservatives have never claimed that people killed in Sudan ar eless important.  Iraqi oil only matters in that it provided Iraq with the financial means to take his brutality into the global arena. In addition, liberals like Sean Penn and Michael Moore have implied that Iraq was a wonderful country of love and sunshine before those beastly Americans can charging in.

The argument behind the war on Iraq was fairly straight forward: Iraq was a danger to the United States because Saddam was a very very bad man who was an enemy of the United States who either already had weapons of mass destruction that he coudl funnel to terrorists or had the means to make them and was merely waiting out the sanctions.  Time has shown that while he didn't have WMDs on hand, he was planning to wait out the sanctions and then reconstitute his program in rapid order.  Therefore, evidence that shows that Saddam was a very very bad man helps make the case that he had to be taken down.