Kerry's Gaffe

Radley Balko | October 31, 2006

Blogger John Cole explains how to gauge the scandal-worthiness of the latest outrage du jour:

A general rule of thumb regarding controversies like this is to count how many posts Michelle Malkin has about the issue, and to note that there is a positive correlation to how trivial the matter is and how many posts she has about it.

For the record, she's up to five, well over twenty if you include updates.

Comments

|10.31.06 @ 5:23PM|#

Just what correlation is there between education level and the probability of service in the military? I have always ASSUMED, perhaps incorrectly, that the correlation is negative. i.e. The more education one has, the less likely one would be in the military.

In a way, Kerry is echoing the reality of the Vietnam era, when college kids were largely immune to conscription and service in the war.

R C Dean|10.31.06 @ 5:36PM|#

I think Kerry's gaffe points up a number of things that the Dems would rather not have highlighted right right before an election:

(1) John Kerry. 'nuff said

(2) A Dem heavyweight denigrating military service as a career by encouraging young people to stay away from it.

(3) A Dem heavyweight implying that the military is populated by losers.

While that was apparently true back in his day (assuming he is a representative sample), my personal observation is that a 25 year old who has spent six years in the military is likely to be far more capable than a twenty-five year old with a liberal arts masters degree.

(4) The rather odd spectacle of Mr. "I voted for it before I voted against it" telling young people not to fight in the war he voted for. A very nice precis of Dem irresolution and incoherence on foreign policy, their Achilles heel.

|10.31.06 @ 5:39PM|#

I've asked this question here before, about who is this Michelle Malkin, but at least I got an answer, finally, about why I should care about what she thinks. *smacks forehead* ...it's to gauge how unimportant something is. Thanks Balko! ...and welcome aboard.

|10.31.06 @ 5:46PM|#

Gee, RC: what are you smoking?
This is what you concluded when you heard the entire piece by Kerry, or what you concluded after listening to a battalions worth of chickenhawks desperately steering peoples gaze from thier own vile record?
theres zero, NOTHING- in Kerrys record to suggest he thinks soldiers are stupid. There is EVERYTHING in the neocon scam & the chickenhawks who executed it that says they have extreme contempt for peoples intelligence- and, even more reprehensible- soldiers lives.
And I dont like John Kerry one little bit, goin all the way back to '70.

|10.31.06 @ 5:57PM|#

Kerry already has a demonstrated propensity for not knowing when the stop talking.

All that aside, Radley's most excellent observation about Malkin is spot on.

|10.31.06 @ 6:14PM|#

Funny, I saw the clip of the speech in its entirety. I didn't even catch the gaffe the first time. I DID assume he was talking about George Walker Bush's Education. Not the troops.

But when the media pointed out his actual words, i realized that his sentence is implying that "if you're uneducated you get stuck in Iraq". His campaign is now saying he should have said: "when you're uneducated you GET US stuck in iraq"

Two points:

1. Either way you intrepret Kerry's words, he's correct. If you are the President of the United States and can't tell a Sunni from a Shia and attack Iraq, you probably can't possibly know what the outcome would be. And if you are uneducated in the US you will end up doing work with the lowest job safety which will lead to your death. The first one is a valid point, the second one is a valid, yet heartless and politically suicidal point.

2. Kerry should stay away from jokes altogether. John Kerry should abstain from any political activity that requires good comic timing or political savvy. He has none. Please stick to your Lexicon-Rich Oratory. Those who get you will feel good that somone in the government isn't a complete moron, and those who can't understand you will in the back of their head allow for the possiblity that "Kerry must be really smart, he uses big words"

Leave the clever timing to the Clintons, they may be scoundrels but they got style.

|10.31.06 @ 6:26PM|#

I really do like the idea of a Malkin Meter that updates, in real time, showing how unimportant something is.

No doubt, one of you propeller head commenters should be able to whip up something like that pretty quick?

|10.31.06 @ 6:31PM|#

Terry,

Did you cancel you subscription yet?

|10.31.06 @ 6:34PM|#

highnumber, the correct acronym to use in such cases is:

GCRICMS

("Goodbye, cruel Reason; I'm canceling my subscription.")

An acronym will save a lot of time.

|10.31.06 @ 6:42PM|#

Terry

You seem unable to make arguments, preferring ad hominem and denigration.

Please go away.

|10.31.06 @ 7:01PM|#

Ahh, poor Kerry. I guess everyone has to have their "Mel Gibson" moment. Perhaps I could believe this was an accident - if you hadn't shown a past history of spitting in the troops faces.

Great job of swinging a few seats in Congress to the Republicans, while destroying whatever hopes you had in '08!

|10.31.06 @ 7:02PM|#

Kerry has an established history of horribly expressing his ideas (voted for it before I voted against it, etc.). This is one more example, where he picked a really dumb way to criticize the President.

|10.31.06 @ 7:06PM|#

Aresen,

Lay off Terry. I find him entertaining, in a sort of "Hey! Look at that madman. I think he's going to hurt someone, hopefully himself. I sure am glad he's locked in that cage," sort of way. He's kind of like the anti-MUTT. They both write in a stream of consciousness style, but where MUTT has opinions formed on experience and contemplation regardless of whether you agree with him, Terry is like a rabid dog foaming at the mouth. MUTT chooses to write like he does. Terry just can't help it. MUTT's writing references the Beat poets, Mark Twain, Hunter Thompson via style. Terry's references poop and canceling his subscription. How often do you get a living, breathing self-parody right in your midst? The poor little guy will tire himself out soon enough (or buy the scope for his high-powered rifle). Let him have his fun for a little while.

|10.31.06 @ 7:07PM|#

So this is what we're going to screech about for the next week?

Kerry was so lame in 2004 that if I were conspiracy-minded I might have thought his campaign was a favor from one Skull & Bones guy to another.

Ron Hardin|10.31.06 @ 7:08PM|#

I don't see what anybody ever saw in Kerry, a blowhard who always believes he's speaking to posterity itself, and has a fatal attraction to strung-together talking points.

Particularly fatal is the tendency to produce compound subjects and objects joined by ``and,'' when another though drifts throught his head in the course of cliche development.

However, it's pretty clear that he was doing the Bush-is-dumb talking point and just went off on some meaningless bit of oratory that unfortunately also meant something else.

His attack-apology is very funny, if you're fascinated by Kerry's dysfunctional persona on the scene, and wondering how the scene will deal with it.

I can't read Malkin at all. Another humorless female, is probably the problem.

|10.31.06 @ 7:08PM|#

"A Dem heavyweight denigrating military service as a career by encouraging young people to stay away from it."

Given that he explicitly puts it in the context of Iraq, it doesn't appear to be a generalized warning to avoid military service.

It's entirely rational to conclude, at present, that enlisting in the Army or Marines is likely to give you a one-way ticket to a plastic bag courtesy of an IED, just so George W. Bush can save face.

There are idiots in command. Why anyone would enlist knowing the low quality of the present leadership is beyond me. This is an entirely different calculation than could have been made in late 2001 or 2002, when they could have been given the benefit of the doubt.

Signing up now is like a WW1 soldier volunteering for service under a general known to be inordinately fond of massively suicidal human wave attacks against well-defended trenches.

|10.31.06 @ 7:11PM|#

"I have always ASSUMED, perhaps incorrectly, that the correlation is negative. i.e. The more education one has, the less likely one would be in the military."

Heritage did this a while ago. If I remember correctly, you are wrong. But I'm not going to read it again.

Knock yourslef out.

|10.31.06 @ 7:15PM|#

Jon H - I know I've mentioned it before, but I was about to enlist in the Army Guard, but decided I didn't want to be maimed or killed fighting in Iraq. Afghanistan wouldn't bother me...we at least had some reason to go in there. So anecdotally, I agree with your point.

Brian - you got my conspiracy-mind thinking on that one. Nice one!

|10.31.06 @ 7:51PM|#

we are all stupid for focusing on Kerry instead of asking the military why they are losing yet another war.

|10.31.06 @ 8:11PM|#

"NOTHING- in Kerrys record to suggest he thinks soldiers are stupid."

John Kerry accused American serviceman of war crimes in both Iraq and Vietnam without one shred of credible evidence of such. He is a publicity hounding media whore. Why anyone Republican or Democrat cares what he says about anything is beyond me.

Look, said what he said, he didn't catch himself or really make any effort to retract it until people rightfully went ballistic over it. He also echoed what a pretty significant minority of liberals believe; that any one in the military is a war mongering fanatic or more likely a stupid chump. Kerry really hit a nerve on both sides because he confirmed what conservatives suspect about Democrats, that they are sniveling elitist bastards who wouldn't take a shit to defend this country unless it was on the people who actually do, and he touched a nerve with Democrats some of whom really do in the heart of hearts really do believe that and are desperately defensive about it and their increasingly non-existent patriotism. It is no surprise that this would develop into quite the kafuffle.

That said, the Dems that are defending this clown kill me. Every Democratic partisan should be livid. This clown single handedly has enraged and mobilized what was a pretty demoralized Republican base. The best that can be hoped for is that it will only be kind of bad for the Democrats. It might be really bad and cost them a majority in the Congress. Either way, it has to drive Democratic candidates crazy that this has been or never was could have such any effect on the election. For this alone, I would think that Kerry would no longer be welcome in polite company in the Democratic Party.

|10.31.06 @ 8:16PM|#

That he still would have been a better President than Bush is the saddest part of the whole story.

|10.31.06 @ 8:48PM|#

I think Kerry has provided his country with a very useful service.

Have you ever found yourself sitting though a few minutes of what someone has to say about politics, only to discover after an investment of some considerable amount of time that he is either a blithering idiot or a wholly dishonest shill?

Well, no more! Thanks to Senator Kerry, all you have to do is take note of who is claiming that he was making a statement about the troops serving in Iraq, rather than about George Bush.

It's like all the idiots and hacks in America were kind enough to stamp "Ignore Me" in big red letters on their forehead.

Thanks, fellas!

|10.31.06 @ 8:52PM|#

John Kerry accused American serviceman of war crimes in both Iraq and Vietnam without one shred of credible evidence of such.

Having a war without atrocities is like having a frat party without vomitting.

|10.31.06 @ 9:00PM|#

It astounds me that there are still people who insist that our military committed no war crimes in Vietnam or Iraq.

We saw the photos. Lt. Calley was put on trial, and the evidence came out. There really is footage of an American officer saying they needed to destroy the village in order to save it (from assisting the communists), while standing in front of a destroyed village. Just this week, a number of marines plead guilty to murder of an Iraqi civilian.

And John Kerry is a liar for saying there were war crimes in Vietnam? Truth just does not matter as much as forty year old culture war talking points to some people.

|10.31.06 @ 9:00PM|#

highnumber

Hadn't thought of it that way.

You gave me my best laugh of the day. Maybe we should see that he gets his vaccinations, though.

|10.31.06 @ 9:11PM|#

No kidding, joe, no war crimes in Iraq? "Abu Ghraib!" / "Lalala, I don't hear you!"

What the heck was that law about torture "techniques" Bush signed if not war crimes?

|10.31.06 @ 9:12PM|#

Either way you intrepret Kerry's words, he's correct.

Except for the part where American servicemen are actually slightly better educated than their demographic peers as a whole.

Hey, and if his comment doesn't boil down to a sort of fragmented flashback amalgam of "stay in school so you don't get [drafted] in the army" and "you'd have to be stupid to go fight the war I voted for", then I don't know what the hell he was trying to say.

|10.31.06 @ 9:24PM|#

Except for the part where American servicemen are actually slightly better educated than their demographic peers as a whole.

That was true for a number of years. It's starting to change again, though.

Kerry has just never gotten his head out of Vietnam. I find it sad, not offensive.

|10.31.06 @ 9:27PM|#

"Hey, and if his comment doesn't boil down to a sort of fragmented flashback amalgam of "stay in school so you don't get [drafted] in the army" and "you'd have to be stupid to go fight the war I voted for", then I don't know what the hell he was trying to say."

Uh, how about, "George Bush is an idiot who got us stuck in Iraq?"

You know, like he says every other time he opens his mouth? Like he had just said, in a different way, ten seconds before?

You might not know this - it's not something that's been widely reported, and Kerry himself is obviously uncomfortable talking about it - but John Kerry was in the military. No, really. He even served in combat. I suppose it's possible that he was denigrating his own intelligence and education, because that would be so in character for him, but I think there's a more likely explaination.

|10.31.06 @ 9:31PM|#

"All that aside, Radley's most excellent observation about Malkin is spot on."

Radley didn't make an observation about Malkin.

|10.31.06 @ 9:38PM|#

"Except for the part where American servicemen are actually slightly better educated than their demographic peers as a whole."

Kerry wasn't talking about servicemen, he was talking about people who put servicemen into the meatgrinder. It was a joke about Bush poorly told, that's that. Regardless, this is the biggest nothing about nothing you could imagine before an election so important, unless Jon Benet's REAL killer surfaces before the end of this week.

|10.31.06 @ 9:49PM|#

Come on guys, joe is right. Kerry was warning these poor kids about the very real danger that they may let their studies slip only to wind up the commander in chief and ass deep in a pointless war. Not, you know, repeating that tired liberal canard about the military being full of the disadvantaged and uneducated poor. Yeah, he blew the joke; much like Ted Danson in blackface.

|10.31.06 @ 10:05PM|#

You know, if John Kerry weren't a Massachusetts big-L liberal, I'd wonder if he weren't a member of a GOP sleeper cell, the way his gaffes seem perfectly timed to help the GOP two elections in a row now. What a goob.

Thomas Blumer|10.31.06 @ 10:24PM|#

I would suggest that whatever you think you're learning from the Malkinometer is more than offset by Drudge's saturation.

Make no mistake. This is big, not because of the comment (which could have been solved by saying "I was wrong, I am sorry"), but because of the non-apology, the lie about a botched joke, and especially because of the deer-in-headlights stone-cold silence of others in his party almost 24 hours later.

The Wine Commonsewer|10.31.06 @ 10:29PM|#

Kerry's a Chubby Head and I think it's interesting to see a whole lot of people turn into pretzels in order to explain away the plain meaning of his remarks.

I also have to ask the point of putting people down who are, well, already down. Why insult the kids who (presumably) have no other way out of bad circumstances except military service. The disenfranchised that the Dems claim to represent. The kids who didn't do well in school and didn't have the opportunities that some of the college kids he was trying to impress did.

Actually, my mom's husband was in the same boat as those desperate kids some 50 years ago. Didn't do well in school and had no opportunities in Mobile.

So he enlisted. By the time he retired, he was running the budget office at the Pentagon for the 3rd Army.

I know, I know, he should have stayed in school, otherwise he might have ended up in Iraq (or Viet Nam).

|10.31.06 @ 10:42PM|#

"What the heck was that law about torture "techniques" Bush signed if not war crimes?"

I think it was actually then White House attorney Gonzales who okayed that, and it was Rumsfeld that signed off. ...It was Bush that subsequently elevated Gonzales to Attorney General, apparently for doing such a good job with torture among other things. Sorry to quibble, but I keep hoping that somebody, somehow will bring charges someday, or at least force the President to pardon the two of them on the way out the door. Until then, we gotta stay focused on the facts. ...otherwise it just looks like so much partisanship.

...and hardly anyone takes partisans seriously. I mean, how many people really think Kerry's comment is a good reason not to vote for whomever they were going to vote for? Rather, how many non-partisans really think Kerry's comment...

|10.31.06 @ 11:07PM|#

Personally, I assumed it was about Bush.

Then, I think Bush is a doofus and I know a number of former members of the US Armed Forces who are pretty damn smart and well-educated.

|10.31.06 @ 11:12PM|#

"I mean, how many people really think Kerry's comment is a good reason not to vote for whomever they were going to vote for?"

Probably not anyone here, but that's not what concerns me. See, I printed off my ballot weeks ago and have been painstakingly filling it in bit by bit. I have another half dozen court decisions to find before I can finish off the remaining judges. But that's me, and I doubt I'm typical. I truly, desperately want the Republicans to take the pounding they have so righteously earned, and shit like this makes me nervous. Thats all.

|10.31.06 @ 11:34PM|#

for what it is worth-

In my platoon in Iraq all five squad leaders (myself included) had B.S. degrees. Since then two of us have received graduate degrees. This is a combat engineer company, not communications or something really technical. This is typical of reserve units, but not the active army.

Mona|10.31.06 @ 11:38PM|#

John Kerry isn't running for anything. In what close races could this make a difference? Surely Jim Webb is immune from notions that a vote for him is a vote that the military is stupid.

But if polling shows it does matter, then Dem candidates simply throw Kerry under the bus, pound the table and scream that every deunciation John McCain issued about Kerry's boo-boo is too tepid.

|11.1.06 @ 12:20AM|#

"Kerry was warning these poor kids about the very real danger that they may let their studies slip only to wind up the commander in chief and ass deep in a pointless war."

Actually, pigwiggle, he was shooting off a rather lame one-liner about the president. Sort of like the rather lame one-liner about the president he shot off immediately before that. He was not educating those kids; he was joshing with them. Openly insulting the president being a very popular bit these days.

Don't believe the spin. These creeps in the administration should not be allowed to get away with deflecting all the criticism of them towards the troops in the field.

coyote|11.1.06 @ 12:25AM|#

I am not sure the correlation on education but there was a study on the wealthiness of the zip codes military recruits are from. The result was that the army is actually skewed a bit rich rather than poor. The graph is here

|11.1.06 @ 12:40AM|#

Watching joe's posts in this thread become increasingly hysterical in his defense of Kerry has been the entertaining high point of my day.

I could give a shit as to what Kerry actually meant or didn't mean when he said that statement before not recanting it.

|11.1.06 @ 12:47AM|#

Guys, ask yourselves:

If you were told that Kerry had said something, but weren't told what it was, what's the likelihood you'd say that he was insulting Bush? And what's the likelihood you'd say that he was insulting your average member of the Armed Forces?

Why is it different when what he said could go both ways? It's obvious he's got foot-in-mouth disease, it's obvious he hates Bush, why is it not obvious that this comment is an instance of him sticking his foot in his mouth while insulting Bush?

|11.1.06 @ 12:52AM|#

I have no particular love for Kerry, but the "lame dig at Bush" reading was my natural one, and certainly a perfectly plausible one. I'm not sure why anyone's harping on this or finds this unlikely. Certainly a hell of a lot more likely than a public official reading off a prepared (and presumably vetted) text that deliberately included the suggestion that you have to be stupid to join the military.

|11.1.06 @ 1:04AM|#

I'm not sure why anyone's harping on this

Uh, so we don't have to discuss Iraq?

It would probably go away if Kerry wasn't such a douche. He appears to be taking a stand to atone for his lack of spine during the Swiftboat episode.

|11.1.06 @ 1:19AM|#

1) This remark of a guy who isn't running, to a bunch of college kids, is about as trivial as you can get. But then I regard a lot of things that are being campaigned on, as trivial, in comparison to things like The Military Commissions Act being signed. But really this is trivial to the extreme.

2) If I wished to discuss the trivial: dang is Kerry annoying! What a patronizing reply to give to a bunch of college students. To tell them to: Do your homework or get stuck in Iraq (to paraphrase). College students should be treated like the adults they so fully are, more than capable of making their own decisions of what to do with their life. And damn the government for creating tar babies like Iraq to begin with, that any young people get stuck in (the disposable ones without formal educations I guess).

3) If Kerry had told the joke like he allegedly intended to, then said joke would be funny.

|11.1.06 @ 1:49AM|#

I have no particular love for Kerry

"I am a liar" is my natural reading of this.

|11.1.06 @ 2:15AM|#

Well if it is about Bush, Kerry's got a lot of nerve anyway. He voted for the damned thing.

I think it was intended as more of a "military exploits the poor and uneducated while the rich kids stay home and get richer" meme that is big within the base of his party (sometimes with race substituted for economic class). He just really wound up with a bad phrase, that seemed to place the blame where it wasn't intended (on the foot soldiers instead of the evil military industrial machine).

Last I checked Kerry wasn't running for anything this election, so I haven't a clue why any of this matters in the slightest. Blaming a politician for every fool thing somebody in his party says is moronic.

|11.1.06 @ 2:26AM|#

Of course Kerry was suggesting that dropping out of college would make you more prone to serve in Iraq. How could it be read as a dig at a President who went through four years as an under-graduate, then got an MBA? A President who has been scolded by Democratic partisans for avoiding service during his youth? That makes NO sense.

Dems have been in the habit of tossing out the scare meme that Iraq will require a draft. It plays a bit with some college audiences. And for Kerry - operating under the fixed delusion that his service in Nam is the most important passage in American history - well...it's easy to get confused!

Really confused. Student deferments were eliminated before the Viet draft ended, and are unlikely to be included in any future draft. (Also unlikely). But they existed during the only significant episode in Kerry's life (enough, so he took four of them...and applied for more) so naturally he can't get it out of his head.

|11.1.06 @ 7:37AM|#

If Kerry wants to spin this as a jibe against the president, he may need some brushing up on how the English language works, particularly pronouns.

Let us remember that Kerry and Bush have rather similar educational histories, yet the Republican is the stupid one and the Dem is the great intellect? Riiight.

For this war that the left does not approve of there is no loophole ridden draft to wave around as bloody shirt. The left has been busy trying to create one by making the case that servicemen are unfree by circumstance from making any other choice. That argument has the unfortunate implication that people who join the military are the worst and dimmest of US society. Kerry's comment is just the most clear statement of that implication.

|11.1.06 @ 8:08AM|#

When graduating with a degree from Yale is characterized as being intellectually lazy and uneducated, I guess we'll have witnessed the final rites being read for east coast elitism.

|11.1.06 @ 8:10AM|#

"I think it was intended as more of a "military exploits the poor and uneducated while the rich kids stay home and get richer" meme that is big within the base of his party (sometimes with race substituted for economic class)."

Democrats often do make that point about race and class, and how it influences who fights and dies in our wars. Is it plausible to conclude that Kerry was doing that? Let's look at the quote:

"You know, 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."

Is that how Democrats generally talk about the injustices related to economic class? By attributing to individuals blowing off their education, not studying hard, not doing their homework, and not making an effort to be smart? When they discuss the poor and black being overrepresented in the armed forces, do they blame it on poor people and black people not doing enough to lift themselves us by the bootstraps through the educational system?

|11.1.06 @ 8:37AM|#

When graduating with a degree from Yale is characterized as being intellectually lazy and uneducated, I guess we'll have witnessed the final rites being read for east coast elitism.

I assume you're referring to GWB

If you think attending ivy league schools is proof of intellectual fortitude, then you clearly havent attended one.

you probably HAVE been either a guest or member of a country club at some point. If you think country clubs are proof of, i dont know, financial fortitude? translate the same to elite universities. They are chock full of the retarded legacy children of the rich and connected. My co-students included daughters of Charles Schwab, heir to cambell soup fortune, Gore clan cousins: almost all riding a C- all through school, which is technically an F at any Public university, where teachers have more freedom to call a spade a spade and boot genuine underperformers out.

JG

|11.1.06 @ 8:48AM|#

Gilmore,

You are abslutely right about legacies in undergrad but not so much in graduate school. Exhibit A is John Kerry. He is basically a dofus and that got him into Yale as an undergrad but where did he go to law school? BC. Being from old money only got him so far. It didn't get him into a top flight graduate school. If Bush had only gone to Yale, you would have a point, but he got that MBA as well and to get that he had to have done something besides be a Bush.

|11.1.06 @ 8:57AM|#

"when they discuss the poor and black being overrepresented in the armed forces"
. . . they are wrong.

|11.1.06 @ 9:20AM|#

You are abslutely right about legacies in undergrad but not so much in graduate school. Exhibit A is John Kerry. He is basically a dofus and that got him into Yale as an undergrad but where did he go to law school? BC. Being from old money only got him so far. It didn't get him into a top flight graduate school. If Bush had only gone to Yale, you would have a point, but he got that MBA as well and to get that he had to have done something besides be a Bush.

Nonsense. I went to graduate school with a number of unqualified legacies, and their connections were apparently their most important (or only) qualifications. Why would a graduate school care about legacies any less than an undergraduate school? Graduate schools and undergraduate schools both seek donations and political/business connections, which is exactly why they prefer legacies. It seems to me that your theories are conclusion oriented: start from the assumption that Bush must be brighter than he seems, and work from there.

|11.1.06 @ 9:20AM|#

Kerry's comment was stupid because GW has a college education so even in the context he tried to use his statement was pointless. I believe these days you must have a degree to be a pilot in the military. Bush flew a jet, Kerry drove a boat. After having personally piloted both a plane(prop) and boat I can assure you the boat is much easier to handle.

What I think most bizarre is our view of elite colleges as if they hold some secret knowledge no one else is allowed to have unless they are willing to pay lots of $$$$$$ in tuition for the honor of finding out. Just because you paid more for something does not mean its better than something that cost less. Just this morning I see Harvard is suspending a few students for plagerism. Top notch Ivy league students right? Sounds like future politicians in the making to me.

Colleges are full of pin headed professors regardless of what tuiton costs. I think the fact that a lot of our Federal Politicians are Ivy league grads points out the fact they are no more capable than anyone else. Unless you consider what they have managed to accomplish over the past 20+ years a success.

|11.1.06 @ 9:53AM|#

Now that I'm finally able to get that dreamy Terry out of my head, I have to say that it is an obvious dig at Bush, not at all a comment about the military.
With retrospect, I can see why Kerry lost to Bush. He is a far worse public speaker than our oratorically challenged POTUS.

|11.1.06 @ 9:55AM|#

The "joke" as originally intended was not about being uneducated so much as about "not doing your homework" and "not being prepared". Bush is educated, but in the matter of Iraq he didn't do his homework, wasn't prepared and got stuck. That's all. I agree it doesn't work very well when you have to explain it, but like somebody else said, Kerry should stay away from jokes with the same care that he has stayed away from the oval office.

|11.1.06 @ 10:05AM|#

To tell the truth, telling "stupid" jokes about the President in 2006 isn't exactly going to get you a chapter in Profiles in Courage.

Kerry's unfunny quips were low-road pandering, and you don't want to fight George Bush on the low road. It's where he lives.

|11.1.06 @ 12:53PM|#

What Kerry said is, basically, unimportant. It's vague enough to mean pretty much nothing. However, his handling of the political attack dogs on the right has been pathetic. I'm not talking about the fairness of the attack or the content of Kerry's statements. I'm just recognizing Kerry's political ineptitude with a national and/or mainstream audience. Which is no surprise, because a highly evolved refrigerator could've defeated George Bush.

I'm beginning to think the litmus test for voters should be whether the candidate attended an Ivy League school. If so, vote against :)

|11.1.06 @ 2:36PM|#

John, as usual, confuses chickenhawk radio with reality when he parrots the line:
" John Kerry accused American serviceman of war crimes in both Iraq and Vietnam without one shred of credible evidence of such. "
Turn off the radio John. Take a deep breath. Read this.
The follow up article chronicled how troops who spilled the beanms about atrocities were hounded & branded as liars by the chickenhawks of the day.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-vietnam20aug20,0,4709695.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Kerry, and my old outfit, VVAW, were telling the facts decades ago.
The war in Viet Nam was a massive, useless, needless war crime.
John- clowns like you will be the death of this Republic.
terry is a useless clown. Your kind poses an actual threat to human liberty.

|11.1.06 @ 6:24PM|#

Dems have been in the habit of tossing out the scare meme that Iraq will require a draft. It plays a bit with some college audiences.

It plays big because it's true. When people like McCain insist that the way to fix Iraq is by adding 20,000 more soldiers on the ground despite the fact that we don't have that to spare and the military is suffering from spectacularly low rates of retention, the fact that those soldiers will have to come from somewhere is obvious.

If Bush had only gone to Yale, you would have a point, but he got that MBA as well and to get that he had to have done something besides be a Bush.

BS. Bush got refused entry to his first choice; the University of Texas Law School, even though Daddy tried to intervene on his behalf. That was why he wound up having to go into the Texas Air National Guard; his student deferment ended. He wound up going to Harvard because the Bush name carried a lot more clout in Boston, where the Bushes are actually from.