SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
Republicans evidenced their election desperation by braying about an offhand comment that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., made at a California college rally.
"Education" Kerry said "-- if you make the most of it and you study hard and 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."
Was Kerry making fun of the president, or warning students against the pitfalls awaiting the undereducated in general?
It doesn't matter. Kerry was right either way.
Kerry wasn't saying -- regardless of the Republican spin -- that our troops are stupid.
Kerry's intended point was obvious. President Bush didn't do his homework before he ordered the invasion. He didn't study the intricacies of Mideast religion, culture, politics and tribalism. He wasn't smart about it and we are stuck in Iraq.
Although there are plenty of well-educated people in our armed forces -- Kerry was one of them -- military service has long been an opportunity employer for those with less education and fewer skills than they need to work in the private sector. Indeed, the military sells itself as a place to garner skills and to help pay for higher education.
And wars, including this one, are often fought by those less privileged -- albeit no less smart -- than the sons and daughters of those who lead us into them.
Apologies? Sure, from the cut-and-run Democratic candidates who've cancelled appearances with Kerry.The Senator, in essence, called Mr. Bush stupid. The context was unmistakable: Texas, the state of denial, stuck in Iraq. No interpretation required. And Mr. Bush and his minions responded, by appearing to be too stupid to realize that they had been called stupid. They demanded Kerry apologize to the troops in Iraq. –
Keith OlbermannTIMES FORGETS KERRY RAN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004. Okay, that's not exactly what happened, but still, this is pretty amusing. Check this out from today's New York Times piece on John Kerry's botched Iraq joke:
Mr. Kerry’s advisers were trying to figure out the damage as he considers a 2008 run.
The long-term problem was not so much that he appeared to be insulting the troops — although that did not help, when his message rests so much on his military service and concern for veterans. It was more that his remarks left a segment of his own party, and perhaps the electorate, wondering if he has the agility and political skill to compete at the highest level.
Did anyone in Kerry's party really tell the Times this? It sounds a lot more like the reporter set out to hear this -- and then when something resembling it came along, went ahead and paraphrased it in the above manner. But it's just silly. Have we already forgotten the 2004 Presidential election? Kerry got over 59 million votes, second in history only to the current resident of the White House. Okay, he was an imperfect candidate and he lost, but still -- there's no question whatsoever that his run demonstrated the skills to at least "compete at the highest level." Sheer idiocy. --
Greg Sargent "John Kerry is not a very good politician," said
Joe Lockhart, a senior adviser to Kerry during his presidential campaign. "Politicians who succeed and do well have great internal instincts and have a great ear for what works and what doesn't. John Kerry has neither. He's not a funny guy. He's not a natural guy. He is not someone who can pick up on the nuances of a daily political battle."
Lockhart says that Kerry, "like a lot of highly educated people," has trouble coming to terms with the fact that "something as important as electing a president or electing a Congress can turn on something so trivial, like a word left out of a joke."
"They take themselves and the process so seriously they have trouble dealing with the rest of the system, dealing with it in such a trivial, half-assed way," Lockhart said. "That's the reality of the situation. Does it make him somehow less of a person? No, I think it makes him more of a person. Does it make him a good politician? No, it doesn't make him a good politician."
That said, Lockhart added, "John Kerry is a good man, and that's why he has gotten as far as he has in politics. So when he says he was telling a joke, everyone should believe him."
Mr. Bush has been pushing these divisive themes all over the nation, offering up the ludicrous notion the other day that if Democrats manage to control even one house of Congress, America will lose and the terrorists will win. But he hit a particularly creepy low when he decided to distort a lame joke lamely delivered by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Mr. Kerry warned college students that the punishment for not learning your lessons was to “get stuck in Iraq.” In context, it was obviously an attempt to disparage Mr. Bush’s intelligence. That’s impolitic and impolite, but it’s not as bad as Mr. Bush’s response. Knowing full well what Mr. Kerry meant, the president and his team cried out that the senator was disparaging the troops. It was a depressing replay of the way the Bush campaign Swift-boated Americans in 2004 into believing that Mr. Kerry, who went to war, was a coward and Mr. Bush, who stayed home, was a hero....When the president of the United States gleefully bathes in the muck to divide Americans into those who love their country and those who don’t, it is destructive to the fabric of the nation he is supposed to be leading --
Editorial, The Great Divider, Published: November 2, 2006But they also share something else in common. When George Bush and the Republican Party decided to beat John Kerry down, John McCain and Hillary Clinton decided to pile on and add a few kicks of their own. Both of these people know John Kerry personally, they know the Republican playbook first hand, they’ve been abused by these same people themselves, and they know full well that John Kerry would never have disparaged the troops. But they both saw a political opportunity to profit by the bloody works of George Bush and Karl Rove, and they didn’t hesitate to take it. --
Mark BarrettRep. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat leading in late polls in his bid to unseat Republican Sen. Mike DeWine, said Republicans are merely trying to change the subject. "The people who should apologize are George Bush and Mike DeWine for sending our troops into battle without body armor and without examining the cooked intelligence," he said.
"John Kerry is not only a great leader for the Democratic party and a great U.S. senator, but he's a patriot," Casey said after a morning political rally in Allentown. "He said he botched a joke and I think that is the beginning and the end of it. He was talking about the president and I think he has every right to criticize this president." –
Bob Casey"I think people will remember John Kerry's press conference today as the moment we Democrats stopped once and forever accepting the disgraceful smears of Republicans. John Kerry showed our Party how to fight back with the truth.
“John Kerry is a patriot who has fought tooth and nail for veterans ever since he came home from Vietnam. He has stood with his brothers in arms unlike this Administration which exploits our troops to make a political point and divide America.
“John Kerry should apologize to no one for his criticism of the President and his broken policy in Iraq. George Bush is the one who owes our troops an apology. This is text book Republican campaign tactics.
“Everybody knows it's not working this time around. If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they've got a partisan political agenda and that's the bottom line. We're not going to take it any more." --
Max ClelandDem strategist James Carville: "It is much easier to say, I botched a joke, than to say, I botched a war. And he was very frank. ... He gave an explanation. And, as I say, Senator Kerry is one of the great war heroes to ever serve in the Congress. He has about a 100 percent record when it comes to the veterans. So, I don't understand exactly what the problem is. He didn't owe anybody an apology. He owed an explanation" ("Situation Room," CNN, 10/31).
"It's time for the President and Vice President to start leveling with the American people, and stop attacking brave veterans like John Kerry who have dared to question the White House's flawed decision to stay the course in Iraq. Every day they attack Democrats instead of reaching out to find a new way forward is another day our security suffers and our troops go without the political leadership they need to succeed. --
Harry ReidGeorge Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.
They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry — a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service — and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.
Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.
They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.
What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men — to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that? --
Thomas FriedmanOn June 13 of this year, my younger brother Russ was killed in Afghanistan. There is obviously no need for me to explain the pain this caused me and my family, from my mother, to Russ' twin brother, to his fiance.
We were contacted by all the members of our state's congressional coalition (all Republicans) and by our governor (John Lynch, a Dem). Only one politician from outside the state contacted us, and that was John Kerry. At Russ' funeral, the only two politicians who attended were Lynch and Kerry (no, cynics, he didn't advertise his appearance or make any statements to the media about it, so don't suggest he did it to win votes).
Since the funeral, a couple of our congressmen have followed up a little with our family. So has Lynch. So has Kerry. He has called my mother on multiple occaisions and offered to do anything he can to help us.
In short, he was there for my family, the family of a fallen soldier. He continues to be there for us, and has offered to do more.
What he said yesterday was clearly a slip of the tongue. He was talking about Bush, and misspoke slightly. The White House knows it, just as we know it. For cheap political gain, Bush and Co. are trying to make it sound as if he is insulting the troops, when they absolutely know that that is not the case.
As someone who has experienced Kerry's support for the troops first-hand, and as someone who has seen him give some small amount of comfort to my griveing mother, I can't put into words how offensive I find the false suggestion, for cheap politcal gain, that Kerry wants to insult our troops and their families.
To everyone out there trying to make that case (Bush, Cheney, Snow, McCain, among others), one simple message: Go to hell. --
RIP Russ “Senator John Kerry has served our country with great distinction, both in the military and in the United States Senate. The men and women of our armed forces know they have a friend and tireless advocate in John Kerry. When it comes to Iraq, he's right to stand up against baseless attacks, and right to keep fighting for a better course for our troops and our country.” --
Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Claudia J. KennedyKristen Breitweiser
11.03.2006
This past week in response to John Kerry's remarks about our troops in Iraq, White House Spokesman, Tony Snow, stated that Kerry should apologize to the troops because he insulted them. Snow preached to Kerry that "it is not that hard to just apologize."
The audacity of the Bush Administration requesting John Kerry to apologize to the troops is astounding given the record this Republican Administration and Republican Congress have with regard to their use of our troops in Iraq.
Admittedly, John Kerry spoke words that offended our troops. As a mistake, a poor judgment call, or a bad delivery of a bad joke, John Kerry's utterance was just that-the passage of words at a speech he was giving to a group of students. Kerry's words did not cause the unnecessary death or injury of another human being. In short, at the end of the day, NOBODY DIED.
If only those words-NOBODY DIED-could be said about the words and actions of the Bush Administration and this Republican Congress in the past five years.
If saying sorry is just "not that hard to do"-according to President Bush's official spokesman, then perhaps President Bush can start apologizing for the many things he is responsible for in the past 5 years. Here is the beginning of that list:
To Lockhart and the pile-on Democrats, shame!
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