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The 'unbotched' joke.

A Kerry spokeswoman, Amy Brundage, said later that the senator's prepared text had called for him to say: "Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush."

The memo Kerrys people produced to show the joke was about Bush had a strange "TH" that could only be produced by 1960's era typewriters....

Even this excuse has been changed to one where he allegedly was supposed to say 'like Bush'

They can't even keep their excuses straight.

The 'unbotched' joke. A Kerry spokeswoman, Amy Brundage, said later that the senator's prepared text had called for him to say: "Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush." If that is what Kerry meant to say than it makes no sense, i.e., you end up being President of the United States if you don't study??????

I was in college from 1965-69 (before enlisting in the Air Force, where I spent 1970-74.) During those Vietnam War years, up until the early 1970's when a draft lottery system was employed, the prevailing mindset was that if one stayed in school, one would avoid the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Allan Sherman, a song parody writer (a predecessor of Weird Al Yankovich) wrote some lyrics to go with a college fight-song, and the last paragraph is a reliable time-capsule of the prevailing sentiment. Here are the lyrics to The Drop-Outs' March:

(No more pencils, no more books,
No more teachers' dirty looks.
Dropouts! dropouts! Yeah team!)

On, dropouts, down the field,
Ain't we the national shame.
Cheer for our fun-loving breed,
Who can't hardly read,
Or write our name.

March, dropouts, backward march.
Ain't we a tragedy.
Leave us unite, and fight, fight, fight
For good old stupidity.

Duh!
Duh!
Drop, dropouts, out of school,
Proud of the will to fail.
You won't find us in the school halls.
Look in the pool halls, or in jail.

Long may our colors wave,
Sons of the black and blue.
Light-hearted chaps
Who steal hubcaps,
We've got nothing else to do.

Ignoramus there you are,
Sitting in your hopped-up car,
And your brains ain't up to par,
And your ears stick out too far.

Go, dropouts, go and buy,
One comic book or two.
You need some rest and enjoyment,
Your unemployment check is due.

Soon, dropouts, very soon,
You'll wear a different hat.
Soon you will be in the Army.
Just try dropping out of that!

John Kerry, whose intellectual growth began and
ended during the Vietnam Era, was probably making
a joke with a similar theme. That is--smart people
educate themselves and succeed; not-so-smart people
flunk out of school and end up in a war zone.

Of course, it is possible that Kerry was actually just
using today's left-wing, politically correct wisdom--that Bush is a moron (although he had better college grades than Kerry.) The amusing thing, to me, is that it really doesn't matter one bit whether the antecedent of the pronoun "you" in Kerry's "You end up stuck in Iraq" is, in fact, George W. Bush, as Kerry claims, or The American Fighting Man, which is the Republican point of view. It doesn't matter because, in today's age of 24-hour spin cycle, appearance always trumps reality.

If the democrats want George Allen's silly "Macaca" utterance to indicate he's a racist, then, by golly, he's a racist. And if Rush Limbaugh repeats Michael J. Fox's own revelation--that he stayed off his meds so that his affirmity would appear more pronounced--then Rush is an insensitive boor, and so are all republicans. In a playing field as politically-charged as we have today, a botched joke is equivalent to totally "dissing" our brave men and women in the military. And, whatever Kerry "meant" doesn't mean a damned thing. If it brings our conservative minions to the polls on Tuesday, the impact will be the same, whatever his intentions.