Posted on 11/01/2006 4:52:11 PM PST by Pokey78
The first time I met Senator John Forbes Kerry was shortly before 9/11, when I was sitting in the office of a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee talking to a young staffer about European defence.
Suddenly, the Massachusetts senator strode into the room and plonked himself, hands on hips, between us. Then he just stood there, clearly expecting us to jump up because he had graced us with his hallowed presence.
He turned his back on me and I studied his perfectly arranged thatch – this was a man who has spent some time on coiffing his hair that morning (or maybe he had someone to do it for him) – as he barked questions and demands at the astonished aide.
Many people in Washington have similar DYKWIA – Don't You Know Who I Am? – anecdotes about Kerry that reveal his narcissistic conceit that it is all about him, all the time. This trait is the key to the kerfuffle over Kerry's comment at a California rally that: "Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
The words were clumsy and, yes, an insult to American troops. I have no doubt that he didn't mean to say that US soldiers in Iraq are dumb cannon fodder but that's what came out. He was trying to say that Bush was stupid (though the Texan's grade-point average at Yale was higher than that of Kerry) – a jibe that plays well in Europe but not in much of Middle America.
It would have been a minor blip in the final week of the campaign if he had apologised immediately and unequivocally and got the hell off the airwaves.
Instead, he wriggled and huffed and hit back and compounded his mistake with intemperate bad-mouthings of Republicans as "assorted Right-wing nut jobs" and "hacks who've never worn the uniform of our country are willing to lie about those who did". Having been, in his view, misrepresented by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in the 2004 presidential race and berated by his own party for not hitting back hard enough, Kerry went for the jugular. But his desire not to be "Swift Boated" (the attacks were so successful they coined a verb) and lack of political judgment meant that this time he overreacted.
To the delight of Republican strategists, as dawn broke across America yesterday, there he was on the Don Imus radio talk show quibbling about his "botched joke". This time, it wasn't so much what the meaning of "is is", as Bill Clinton famously ventured during the Lewinsky scandal as what the meaning of "us is". According to Kerry, "I left out the word 'us'. 'They got us stuck.' Instead of that, I said, 'They got stuck', and they're taking advantage of it." They are indeed taking advantage of it. With a week to go before the mid-term elections and Democrats poised to win the 15 seats they need to win back the House of Representatives – and perhaps even the six to bag the Senate – Republicans were praying for an "October surprise".
Kerry left it late, until Halloween, but the Grand Old Party was not about to look this gift horse in the mouth. On the 2000 campaign trail, Bush told me that politics was "like judo – you use your opponent's energy to your advantage". A gaffe by a politician only has real legs when it reinforces an existing perception. And so it has been in this case. Kerry has long had a reputation as a haughty Boston Brahmin, a privileged, elitist, condescending careerist who cannot relate to ordinary Americans.
In contrast, on the stump this week Bush has shown that whatever his faults – and there are many – that he still has that indispensable political gift of speaking simply to ordinary people rather than talking down to them.
Kerry served with some distinction in Vietnam. It is a question mark over the character of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that they chose to circumvent the draft rather than serve their country in combat. But Kerry's persistent attempts to capitalise on this have become unseemly.
US servicemen are revered in a way that the British squaddie can only dream of. Soldiers travel in uniform and are routinely ushered to the front of queues and given upgrades to business class with no questions asked. On an American Airlines jet from Dallas last Sunday, a flight attendant made a spontaneous announcement about "the sacrifice our young men and women are making to keep us safe". The whole plane applauded her.
This is not just rah-rah jingoism. The aching reality of war is also apparent. At Houston airport on Wednesday night I pulled up behind a white hearse with two soldiers in dress uniform inside it. "That's one of our boys coming home from Iraq," said a sombre Avis representative, waving me past.
As Kerry has found out, you try to exploit this sentiment for political gain at your peril. The military is the most integrated sector of American society. Poor youths with a bit of get up and go about them use it to get funding for college to pull themselves up a rung on the economic ladder.
I have sat in Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles with black sergeants from Alabama, marines from Mexico and good ol' boy snipers from Kentucky in places like Fallujah and Ramadi as they described their hopes with an affecting optimism that belied the mortal danger they were in. In many ways, they embody what is great about America.
Yesterday, Democratic candidates from Montana to Iowa and Minnesota to Tennessee were cancelling campaign rallies with Kerry and demanding he apologise. Preposterously, the senator was claiming that he was returning to Washington "so that I'm not a distraction".
Those ruing his intervention the most were the candidates he'd appeared with, such as Patrick Murphy, an impressive 33-year-old Iraq veteran poised to pick up a House seat outside Philadelphia. Kerry went there recently to attack Republicans who "think they've served because they played with GI dolls".
In tight seats like that, Kerry could tip victory into defeat. Even if his party overcomes this late setback and prevails on Tuesday, Kerry's hopes for the White House in 2008 are disappearing faster than Democrats can run away from him.
"That still makes no sense. I thought he said "you" will get stuck in Iraq?"
That's right. The joke was supposed to be....if you don't study, if you're not smart...then you will wind up in the office of the presidency and you will "get us stuck" in Iraq. Funny..huh? Believable...right?
Cheney, Bush, Kerry and many, many others dodged the draft. Viet Nam was an unpopular war. To see that clearly just contrast GW's behavior with that of his father during WWII.
No, if you can't back up your statements, I'm not going on a google hunt to do it for you. Either you contribute to this forum or you don't.
Kerry is what is often referred to as a f***ing moron.
It's not a hunt, it's a list of tens - or hundreds - of articles detailing Cheney's deferments and stated reasons for avoiding service.
I list them to give you the opportunity to evaluate the sources. But if you don't want to bother, then don't. You can lead a horse to water...
Didn't read that thread. But I'll be more than happy to keep it front and center when the issue is raised again.
He dumped Theresa???
Some people just cannot handle having to work in the real world.
Excellent tagline!
You know.. if the American Military really is as dumb as John (D student) Kerry thinks.. maybe he would be the right leader for our time?!
Raymond
You didn't list a thing. But thanks for your incredible efforts.
Google provides a list of relevant articles. Apparently you find that too challanging. Try googling "Cheney+deferments+Viet Nam" - that will filter out all articles in which Cheney disputes the comparison of Iraq with Viet Nam. If even that's too much then perhaps you should consider a return to grammar school.
Yup.
I wonder if a dishonorable discharge had any weight with Harvard Law School when they were considering whether to admit Kerry. Of course, he later got that removed in the Carter administration thanks to friends in high places.
<< It is a question mark over the character of (United States President and Armed-Forces Commander-In-Chief) Bush and Vice President (Richard) Cheney that they "chose to circumvent" the Draft ... >>
Bullshit. Mr Bush faced the same likelihood of going to Vietnam as any other Air Force Officer with his qualifications and experience at that time and stage of the war -- and each of them in any case fulfilled his every obligation to the Law.
Kerry, poor treasonous bastard, is thicker than two planks and like so many of his colleagues who've similarly never had real jobs, been responsible to profit and/or met payrolls, including especially the former bag woman from Arkansas, is of sufficiently low intelligence to be unaware of being continually out of his paddling pool depth limitation.
He is incapable of recognizing that beyond the legions of similarly pathetic parasitical morons who populate DC the largest percentage of Americans are incredibly more intelligent and/or competent than he and is incapable of recognizing a superior intellect -- Mr Bush's, say -- and notwithstanding it constantly has the better of him!
<< Kerry drove a boat. Hell. I can drive a boat. I can drive a boat full throttle away from a fire-fight any day of the week.
I can do it drunk, too! >>
I can't drive a boat worth a darn but can rent an Earth Person to do it for me. But I can surely fly a single-seater aeroplane. To or from and especially in a fight.
And can do it drunk, too!
<< Kerry's persistent attempts to capitalize on [his Vietnam service] have become are ghoulishly unseemly. >>
Especially to those of us who've spent some or all of the intervening years out here in Asia trying to clean up after the three and a half million or so slaughterings the treasons and subversions he and Lyndon Baines Johnson and Cronkite and Rather and Arnett and Fonda and the other usefully-idiotic savants, Socialist Internationalists, communist agents, fifth columnists and fellow travelers precipitated.
I was with this writer until this assinine statement. Sounds like he's stuck in Iraq.
<< Scary that these scary people (Gore, Kerry) get so close. Shows you how many idiots we have in this country. >>
Since Kennedy et al dammed the traditional immigrant stream from Northern and Western Europe and replaced it with forty years of continual flow of millions of third world immigrants and millions more criminal aliens America's Mean IQ, once 100, has plunged to such a degree that way more than half of our population, Kerry and Gore and Missus Cli'ton et al, dangerously dullard among them, is of way less than what was, forty years ago, considered to be "average" intelligence.
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