But he wasn’t.  He may regard them with contempt (my personal impression is that JK regards most of the human race with contempt); he may despise them; he may think they’re dumb crackers;  but T-H-A-T-‘-S  N-O-T  W-H-A-T  H-E  S-A-I-D.

What he said was:  “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.”

Who is stuck in Iraq?  Not the common soldier, who just does a tour of duty, as Kerry himself knows from (sorry to bring it up) experience.  Who’s stuck in Iraq?  George W. Bush is stuck in Iraq.  That was the point of Kerry’s joke.  Which he botched.  No fair-minded person, watching Kerry deliver those lines, could think otherwise. ~John Derbyshire

If the Derb is right, and I think he is, what can it say for all of the legions of Republican loyalists and pundits that the first thing that leaped to their minds was, “This is an insult to our troops!”  Granted, it was one of the worse, “Bush is a moron” jokes of our time, but doesn’t the reaction to this strike anyone as being as strained and incredible as the Democratic reaction to the alleged miscegenation references in the anti-Ford ad in Tennessee?  People hung up on race and racism see references to race even when they aren’t there, as they did in that ad (the ad was sleazy and asinine, not racist); people who assume that Kerry was talking about military personnel…well, perhaps their respect for the soldiers isn’t quite what it should be if they automatically assume that references to poor education have something to do with soldiers.  At the very least, it seems clear that everyone went into ideological overdrive the minute someone possibly said something questionable about “the troops”–rather than pay attention to what was said and what the clown intended to say, they picked up the worn-down refrain, “That lousy liberal insulted the troops!” because they know they have nothing else to say.  That said, would someone just make John Kerry go far, far away where he cannot bother anyone?  Perhaps Mars?  (But, then, what has Mars ever done to us that it should be punished in this way?)   

So Kerry is a buffoon (we already knew that) and the worst comedian on earth (we assumed as much), but how desperate and bereft of any positive appeal do these people have to be that they are literally thanking God for delivering them something, anything, that can distract voters from the war and the failures of this majority and this administration?  How worthless must the argument for their retaining a majority be that they are so thrilled to finally have some political oxygen for their worn-out cliches about how they are the party of national defense and national security?  They cannot thrive on the merits of their own record, which is an appalling record, so they must have a hate-figure to rally against, and no one serves this role better than the ridiculous, the preposterous, the unbelievably obnoxious John Kerry.  People who fall for this and re-elect the GOP deserve whatever they get.