Posted on 07/31/2004 8:47:30 AM PDT by quidnunc
"The embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world," declared Ted Kennedy, in a moment of Revolutionary War nostalgia. Or he would have done, if he'd managed to stick to his text. But, in a strikingly erratic performance even by his standards, what actually emerged from the senator's lips was: They "fired the shirt round the world.''
That sums up better than anything what the Democratic Party's been trying to do this last week for its presidential candidate: fire the stuffed shirt round the world, put a rocket up a guy who seems weighed down by his own self-importance and project him into the stratosphere. All the star speakers through the week were the equivalents of those bits of the rocket that boost you up into space and then fall away, leaving just the little capsule up there. And, who knows, if they boosted him up high enough, maybe nobody would notice just how little there is to John Kerry's little capsule.
Well, that was the theory. "I'm John Kerry," began the candidate on Thursday night, "and I'm reporting for duty!"
Democratic Party partisans appreciate this stuff — a stageful of Swifties, the war-wounded Max Cleland, "we band of brothers, a little older, a little grayer" — but they appreciate it mainly as a post-modern jest, a way of sticking it to the GOP. To anybody else, including those sought-after "swing voters" in "battleground states," it's starting to sound a little weird. John Kerry says he's running on his record, but, of his four decades of adult life, he's running on his four months in Vietnam. Of the other 39 years and eight months, there's nary a word.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at suntimes.com ...
"war-wounded Max Cleland" ?
Some classic Steyn here:
"Instead of marrying his money, he suid his way into it."
Articles like this ALMOST make sitting through the creepy Dem Convention worth it.
suid=sued. Aaagh!
Shhhhhhh, we're dealing with feelings here, not facts. :-)
""Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response."
Got that? If the Empire State Building's taken out, he'll certainly respond to it. Next time 'round, there won't be any mistakes about where the WMD are because they'll be in the middle of a big crater in Chicago." "
"So Kerry's position on the war is this: "Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response." Got that? If the Empire State Building's taken out, he'll certainly respond to it. Next time 'round, there won't be any mistakes about where the WMD are because they'll be in the middle of a big crater in Chicago. For me that one line encapsulates the stale, dozy complacency of the supposedly complex Kerry."
As usual, Steyn-O-Mite !!!
That's the essence of this convention: a condescending media congratulating a condescending leadership for effectively communicating to their condescending activists their plans for everyone else. John F. Kerry should enjoy it while he can. It's downhill from here.
"Articles like this ALMOST make sitting through the creepy Dem Convention worth it."
Good point, actually. At least those of us who sat through the speeches and cussed the participants have a perspective.
"...Next time 'round, there won't be any mistakes about where the WMD are because they'll be in the middle of a big crater in Chicago." "
I have relatives in Chicago, that are big liberals, who receive the Sun-Times. I hope they read Steyn's article.
"If I can do it, you can't"
And drifting in the wind towards Gary, Indiana. But for Gary, that might be an improvement.
Playing with live grenades in the rear...he didn't get any Purple Heart for that, did he?
So true about Kerry "sticking it to the GOP". They are so desperate for "swing votes" that they sink so low to trick some to think they are "patriotic" and are willing to defend America. Far from it! A weak national defense is NO defense when it comes to thwarting and deterring terrorism. Just look how Clinton took care of terrorism...he didn't. Thus, the defense implosion of America began long before 9-11 in NY. "Maybe that all depends on what the meaning of the (phrase)"..."building infrastructure"..."IS." However, we never imagined that meant he would practically invite terrorists as a wrecking crew to tear down the old WTC so we could build anew.
BTW - "Stuffed shirt" fits John Kerry. How 'bout that for a slogan?
I love Mark Styne when he's on a roll (which is always), and he really got this one right. When I heard Kerry make that dumb statement, that was my thought, too: next attack? He's telling us to sit back and wait for the NEXT one, and then the US will REALLY do something...ooohhh, I betcha AQ is scared.
Actually, maybe we should wait till the one after that. Or the one after...
Well, we can certainly hope it is, but, then, we recall when the best candidate the democRATs could proffer was a B.S.in', draft-dodgin' rapist who "didn't stand a chance" against a proven George H. W. Bush.
Remember the result?
Teddy had been drinking again, hadn't he?
Fat, drunk and stupid. Can't repeat those adjectives in relation to Edward Moore Kennedy enough times.
His influence is all out of proportion to his intellect.
Floundering for a cause with which to rally the citizenry, the party eventually found one: itself. "Our greatness is also measured by our goodness," declared Howard Dean.
"I've seen it in the people I've met and their desire to take our country back for the American people. I saw it in a college student in Pennsylvania who sold her bicycle and sent us a check for $100 with a note that said, 'I sold my bicycle for democracy.' "
Really? John F. Kerry's bicycle cost $8,000. Why doesn't he sell his for democracy? If you throw in the designer French T-shirt and buttock-hugging lemon-hued lycra shorts, you'd probably be up around an even ten grand. When Howard Dean and John Kerry and John Edwards talk about "change," what they mean is you send these bazillionaire grandees the hundred-dollar bill and they'll keep the change.
What did that co-ed cutie get for her hundred bucks? Presumably she sent it to Governor Dean because he was anti-war. He lost to Senator Kerry, who at that time was for-and-against the war, in the same way that he's for-and-against abortion and for-and-against gay marriage. But he seems to have come down, Iraq-wise, on the "for" side of the ledger. He'll be spending a little more time ineffectually chit-chatting with Kofi and Jacques and Gerhard, but other than that his Iraq policy is sounding more like Bush's every day. That college kid ponied up her $100 and isn't getting a lot of "change." I wonder if she's missing her bicycle this summer.
Funny, too, was the fact that the mainstream media conveniently avoided commenting on Ted Kennedy's screw up. With all the help, the liberals have gotten from the media it's a wonder Kerry is up by 25 points.
We are not going to keep these unworthies out of the White House on one big issue. We'll keep them out with a hundred smaller issues, all of which cause a "little" harm.
Congressman Billybob
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