My Reply To Senator Kerry

Whew. Now that my lovely wife is done seething and swearing, I get a chance to put my thoughts down on this subject. First let me say clearly that I do support her position. It is the same outrage shared by a good majority of people, including serving and retiured military personnel. And she has a good reason to feel that way. Senator Kerry's comments were completely out-of-touch, and slanderous; the two guys I graduated with that went onto join the US Navy (one is a SEAL) graduated in the top one percent of our high school class, and they have only expanded that level of intelligence. Another friend of mine who graduated a couple of years before I did just saw his son off to boot camp. His son's graduating GPA? 3.9; just shy of the 4.0 straight A's.

Are there people who "fall back" on the military as a career option--the sort of people that John Kerry is portraying? Sure, BUT the military trains these young men and women in a variety of areas, AND their accomplishments in high school or college shouldn't one d*mn bit of bearing on their record in the United States military.

THAT is the point of the outrage. Not only does he portray our troops to be stupid losers in life, and take the seemingly only option avaiable to them, but he slams the rest of the military by generalizing his view. That's a pretty broad analogy there, Senator. Care to elaborate?

And he has. He began the spin quickly. "It was a joke about the president," was the excuse. Um, no one's buying it. No one's laughing. Then came the response that he wasn't apologizing and the GOP is blowing this out of context.

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

OK, so where's the "out-of-context" argument? Anyone see it. It looks pretty cut-and-dry to a lot of people; Marcie and I among them. If you don't do well in school, you're going to Iraq. Not only does this slander our troops, but he makes it out to be some sort of punishment. I wonder Senator Kerry thinks will happen if you don't eat your vegetables. Will you go to Vietnam like he did? Or maybe H*ll?

The anger emanating from the people who have heard this is more than justified. And as yet we STILL CAN'T find a single Democrat who has told him to apologize, or have called him on the carpet for his statement. It's like aterrorist attack just occurred, and people are claiming that the moderate Muslims are shouting from the rooftops, condemning the act. The silence id deafening from the Democrat party.

And through that they are silently condoning the comment. I must concur with Marcie; If this is their attiutude, then let's hang them by it. They are standing by him on his view, and that includes every Democrat running for office right now. Their GOP opponents need to nail them on the point, and do so all week. Why drag this out for a week? Simply put, the Democrat leaders don't want to address it, and neither do their operatives, in hopes that the oxygen on the story will evaporate quickly. The operatives--The Kossacks, Michael Moore and Mother Moonbat fan clubs, the DU Kiddies, etc.--want this story to go away right now. They know that if it gets some legs (which it already has; run a Technorati search, or check out NZ Bear's site, and you'll see it has legs) he might have just killed 2006 for the Democrats in ways worse than he killed his 2004 presidential bid. Hugh Hewitt just stated that the nutter operatives are happy to hear this from him. I disagree.

No offense, if they're happy about this comment, then they've already written off 2006 as a good year for the Democrats. Dean Barnett at Hugh's site observed that they are being relatively quiet on the subject. That tells me that they want this story to die. They want it to die because they know this reaction from the people doesn't bode well for their party. They know that if the GOP can pull this off, John Kerry's statement can be a death knell for their election hopes.

Congratulations, Senator Kerry. If the Democrats lose ANY ground because of this statement, you pretty much just sank your party in the midterms. Do I think that this one statement can make all the difference? If the GOP plays this right, it could. It very well could backfire on them. It's not like this party has a great record on national security and military issues. And this is just another slap in the face of the troops from their friendly, neighborhood Democrat leaders.

Publius II

UPDATE: Dean Barnett has discovered that Markos Moulitsas doesn't disappoint. He completely changed his attitude on this (or he's slept the day away, hoping this would go away) and has gone on the attack:

And for the rest of you who think this is the end of the world -- stop being afraid of your own shadow. Just stop it. Fight or get out of the kitchen!

OK, now we hang them. Come out with guns blazing, and hang this party on a preconceived, post-Vietnam notion that the military, as a whole, was full of idiots. That's unacceptable. He should be apologizing profusely, and he's not. Here is that same old Kerry elitism at work again. This isn't a joke gone bad. This isn't taken out of context. He spoke off the cuff, and let a deep bias and despisement slip out.

So, now we hang the party on this because they either agree with it, which is why they're remaining silent, or they're the stupid ones who can't figure out what sort of damage a statement like this can make. Not smart. Maybe next time he should stick to prepared notes or speeches. At least that way he wouldn't offend so many people. They'd be asleep.