PeterDavid.net

Between the mudslinging at every commercial break and the GOP spinmonsters grabbing ahold of this and lying through their teeth (seriously, they can't be psychotic enough to actually believe they think it was an insult to the troops, they just hope enough voters are stupid enough to buy it)...AND the news lapping this up and gleefully parroting the spinmonster line....

...well, it's now almost impossible to watch the news.

Politics ain't beanbag. When your opponent says something stupid you are perfectly ok to call them on it.

At least one Democrat has disinvited Kerry from a campaign stop, so this is not just a Rovian plot to make him look bad. Kerry does that just fine on his own.

I would have to disagree that the notion that Kerry would diss the troops is unfathomable. He did a pretty good job of that back in 1971. That said, one should not blame mendacity when stupidity is a more likely excuse and that would certainly be the case here.

Had he just said "Hey, I screwed up a joke." right at the beginning it would have been a 1 day story, mostly ignored. By hitting back to show the "NEw & Improved, with 20% More Backbone" John Kerry and THEN admitting he screwed up he made it a 3 or 4 day story. Way to go. The man has the poilitical smarts of a lemur.

Kerry, accidently slamming the military; it doesn't surprise me. Traditionally, the strong left is not a fan of the military. I just thought it was a slip (to the left.)

You ever wonder how elections would go, if the news media would just report the news, rather than picking and choosing what to show; or mulling over events ad nausum or worse, put out polls perdicting the winners, expecially when they're always so "right". (Isn't perdicting the future the opposite of reporting current events?) All these poll comments are either going to make Democrats stay home, thinking they've won things or make Republicans stay home thinking it's a lost cause. That's not reporting the news, but making the news.

Best political editoral I've seen came (but I don't know where it came from) "My opponent is an idiot, and I approved this ad." And that sums up the campaigning this year.

My thoughts on this is that only the stupid would think that Kerry's comments were directed to those serving in the military. Which, given the GOP's reaction, kind of proves my point. Bush has always had his intelligence questioned. He either is, or acts like, an idiot. And the GOP clearly thinks its voter base is too stupid to see the truth behind the lies they spin left and right (right and right?)

What gets me is some Democratic separation from Kerry. What's the #1 thing Democratic supporters have been crying for...for someone to fight back, show some backbone, stand up to the GOP administration juggernaut. Here's Kerry doing exactly that, standing behind his words, standing behind the truth, and refusing to back down from calling the president and this administration out on their actions. And rather than get behind and support someone finally taking a strong position against the GOP, he gets thrown under the bus by some.

Huh. You got to love the way the Texas National Guardman and his Vietnam-what-Vietnam ilk have managed to paint the Purple-Heart-winner into being the one doing such a grave disservice to the troops while pouring a few thousand American men and women into the meat grinder of modern American foreign policy at the bayonet's tip. That takes chutzpah -- and an American press willing to allow them to frame the discussion thusly and not call them on it, and to allow the "righteous indignation" to become a story itself.

When the opponent plays such a consistent playbook of prey-on-fear and kill-the-messenger, you can't afford to make those kind of pronoun mistakes a week before a national election. It's moments like this that move a legacy away from "elder statesman" to "political embarrassment."

"seriously, they can't be psychotic enough to actually believe they think it was an insult to the troops, they just hope enough voters are stupid enough to buy it)"

Well, let's see how solid that hope is, based upon a poll off the AOL news feed:

"How do you view Senator Kerry's remark?
A deliberate insult 58%
A botched joke 34%
I'm not sure 9%"

I think that kind of speaks for itself vis a vis GOP hopes for voter stupidity.

PAD

If I remember correctly, Kerry's words were "leave you stuck in Iraq". The word stuck was as problematic as the lack of pronoun, since while Bush has certainly has us stuck in Iraq, it is a word with very physical connotations and I have never viewed Bush as stuck in Iraq. He made the choices that left the nation stuck.

I don't know...his statement was mainly whining and petty insults. That is hardly the same thing as getting a backbone or standing up against the Administration. What Kerry needs is a script writer who could write something that clearly apologizes to the troops for the misunderstanding and doesn't sling insults, making him look like a child (He indulged in making fun of a person's physical appearance, jeez, I don't like Limbaugh, but calling him "doughy" is hardly a substanative response). His response makes him look petty and weak, not strong and noble.

"If you vote for a Democrat you are supporting the terrorist". This quote has been repeated many times recently by the President. He is not misspeaking. It is exactly what he means to say.
But that's all right. Why take him to task for saying half the population supports terrorism.
But John Kerry muffs a joke and let's spend the next 5 days making it a major issue.
That darn liberal media.

He did a pretty good job of that back in 1971.

Considering he'd actually served in a war, unlike anybody in the current makeup of the Bush Administration, and had seen things some of us thankfully will never have to witness, I'd say he's well within his right to critize those involved in specific events.

Consider events like Abu Ghraib, and you quickly realize that those things Kerry said happened, atrocities and such, could very well have happened and some likely did.

I find the right-wing attacks against those that actually went to war, such as McCain and Kerry to be far more despicable, again, heavily taking into account that those making the attacks never went to war, or did all the could to avoid service.

Conservatives had no problem allowing the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" to make a mockery of Kerry's service to this country.

Yet, they now rally against Kerry's comments.

Absolutely pathetic.

Kerry has nothing to apologize for.

One would think that, having served his 3 months in Vietnam, Kerry couldn't possibly have been slamming the military. He certainly didn't exhibit any of those feelings when he came back from overseas and testified before congress. No sirree.

Of course, if he was making an education joke about the President, it might have made more of an impact if Kerry had pulled down better grades than Bush did.

Personally, I think Kerry knew what he said, knew how it would be interpreted, and did it to "take one for the team" and thus start lathering up the base. But then, maybe I'm just giving him too much credit.

Didn't Bush once say something along the lines of "...the terrorists never stop trying to think of new ways to hurt our country, and neither do we."

So why hasn't anyone demanded that he apologize to the American public for trying to think of ways to hurt them?

Really, if someone were to go through all the 'Bushisms' looking for things to take out of context like this, I'm sure you could find hundreds.

But, of course, no one pays any attention to HIS verbal slipups.

"But, of course, no one pays any attention to HIS verbal slipups."

That's not entirely true. Book publishers and calendar manufacturers have made a small fortune off Bush's ineptitude.

It's just that it no longer makes the news because, well...Bush saying something stupid isn't considered news. It's same old/same old.

PAD

Displaying the comedic instincts of a California Redwood, Kerry SHOULD have said "we." "We wind up in Iraq," which would have made it at least somewhat clearer. Or if he insisted on "you," then it becomes, "you wind up landing us in Iraq." Something like that.

Wouldn't that mean, if you get a good education, you can make something of yourself, but if you don't, then you'll be stupid enough to vote for Bush and those who put us in Iraq? Calling all republicans stupid, might not be a better outcome.

"If you vote for a Democrat you are supporting the terrorist".This quote has been repeated many times recently by the President. He is not misspeaking. It is exactly what he means to say.

And yet, when I type that "quote" into google I get no hits. Huh. Explain, please.

Didn't Bush once say something along the lines of "...the terrorists never stop trying to think of new ways to hurt our country, and neither do we."

So why hasn't anyone demanded that he apologize to the American public for trying to think of ways to hurt them?

I doubt that Bush would react to such a request with fury and indignation and look like an ass. Because--and I know this hurts--he's smarter than Kerry. Faint praise but there you are.

Calling all republicans stupid, might not be a better outcome.

Well, I've said it outright plenty of times after the '04 election: Republicans were stupid because they put Bush back in the White House.

But hey, they deserve nothing less if they're going to support an Administration which is once again repeatedly saying that Democrats support terrorists.

"The Democrat approach on Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses,"

I reserve the right to misconstrue this comment any which way I choose, and to me, Bush is saying "Democrats support terrorism".

The American public will also do no less.

And it's nothing less than the insinuations made post-9/11 that Saddam had something to do with 9/11.

"Wouldn't that mean, if you get a good education, you can make something of yourself, but if you don't, then you'll be stupid enough to vote for Bush and those who put us in Iraq?"

It could mean that if you beat it and tortured it so that it was no longer remotely recognizable as the original sentiment, yeah. Then again, this administration supports beating and torture, except when it doesn't support beating and torture, and staying the course except when they say they weren't all about staying the course, so who knows?

PAD

"I voted for the 80 billion before I voted against it."

Bush is certainly better at rehashing the same statements repeatedly to a mind-numbing degree. I am not sure that he is as smart as Kerry though.

Eric!, I'm not sure of the intention behind your post, but Kerry's statement about voting for before voting against has been taken out of context so many times that it makes me bonkers when I hear it touted about. The vote in question was a "yay" and failed. The proposal was changed significantly before he voted "nay".

"I voted for the 80 billion before I voted against it."

Ooo, nice. Let's put something inept that Kerry said several years ago against Bush saying stupid things such as "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses," two days ago.

The terrorists "won" the moment Bush and company pursued a course that was straight out of the bin Laden wish list.

PAD

Try putting this quote into google:

"However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses."

"I voted for the 80 billion before I voted against it."

Did you know that Bush rejected a Department of Homeland Security, a Clinton idea, before accepting it after 9/11?

Sometimes, people change their minds about things. I know, I know, that means you're nothing more than a 'flip-flopper', but hey, who isn't? Bush is as much of one as Kerry.

Posted by: Bill Mulligan at November 1, 2006 09:33 AM

I doubt that Bush would react to such a request with fury and indignation and look like an ass. Because--and I know this hurts--he's smarter than Kerry. Faint praise but there you are.

Bill, please. By stupidly ignoring the advice of experienced generals and other military experts, and by relying on silly assumptions rather than planning for foreseeable contingencies, George W. Bush got us involved in a war that even conservative's conservatives like George Will have labeled a "fiasco." That shows a level of hubris, arrogance, and abject stupidity that eclipses any of John Kerry's mistakes.

Bush is no less politically tone deaf than Kerry, by the way. Bush began his presidency with a wealth of political capital that many of his predecessors would've given their eyeteeth for: a national resolve to rally around our president in the wake of 9/11. Yet Bush pissed away that political capital to the point where he was only able to narrowly beat Kerry in the 2004 election (that's pretty sad for a wartime president), and has continued to piss away that capital to the point where he is on the political equivalent of food stamps.

You know, it's funny. Donald Rumsfeld put his foot in it when he told the press corps to "back off and relax" while soldiers are dying in Iraq. I don't recall much conservative outrage over that. And I don't see much liberal outrage over Kerry's remarks.

This is the reason why I am losing patience with liberals and conservatives. It seems as though both have forgotten that ideology is supposed to be about ideas and principles, not about two teams circling the wagons around "their guys" and trying to get "the other guys."

It amazes me, by the way, that we are all gleefully wrapped up in this game of verbal "gotcha" while our position in Iraq continues to deteriorate, while we continue to lose ground in Afghanistan, while Iran and North Korea appear to be going nuclear, and while stateless terror groups like Al Qaeda remain a deadly threat.

We. Are. At. War.

And we're concerned because Kerry might have insulted the troops. Or not.

Well, the guys in my Spanish highschool who ended in the army were not precisely the most brilliant ones...

This is the reason why I am losing patience with liberals and conservatives. It seems as though both have forgotten that ideology is supposed to be about ideas and principles, not about two teams circling the wagons around "their guys" and trying to get "the other guys."

This is so on-the-nose that it's actually up a nostril.

What scares me is that 5 days before the mid-term, the media (liberal or not) are making a meal out of this non-story and I find that incredibly sad. No-one went after Rumsfeld for *his* remarks about the soldiers in Iraq - 'sit back and relax' - my ass! As much as I applaud Kerry for standing up and not apologizing, it seems, to me, as though the Democrats are not given any leeway to make mistakes while the Republicans can say and do whatever they want to and not get called on most of it. (See Rumsfeld's remarks).

The two things I want to comment on, by the same person - awesomeness for the lazy win.

Kip, you said
Wouldn't that mean, if you get a good education, you can make something of yourself, but if you don't, then you'll be stupid enough to vote for Bush and those who put us in Iraq?
That's sort of twisting it around quite a bit - you certainly have the first part right, so far as that silly empirical stuff goes, but the second doesn't add up. And for better or worse, our military is more and more made up of people who have no other choice. Who don't have the high school grades to go on to college on free rides, who can't afford tuition, or moving, or a host of other things that block access to education. This has been a huge concern for military higher-ups, this lack of education we see in those enlisting.

Our military should not be built on the backs of those who have no other option to improve their life.

Although there is a correlate to education and liberal political leanings, it's not tied our increasingly underprivileged military. Repeat with me, correlation is not causation.

"My opponent is an idiot, and I approved this ad." And that sums up the campaigning this year.
And this is why I could never run for office - because that's basically what my political adverts would say. Did you catch The Daily Show deconstructing political adverts, and then putting them back together into one megaadvert? A quite literal summing up of campaigning this year.

John--I have no argument with the fact that Bush has said stupid things, it's just that, as far as I can tell, he hasn't said the stupid thing Ed had in quotation marks, along with the statement "This quote has been repeated many times recently by the President." If you're going to say that you should make sure the quote is accurate.

Bill Myers, I'm not going to argue that Bush's handling of the war hasn't been a tremendous mess. But I think that kerry ran the most inept campaign ever--and I've seen Dole, Mondale and Dukakis, so I've seen inept.

The campaign is your entrance exam. It's the test you take to show you are smart enough for the job. He flunked, spctacularly. Against McCain or any other decent candidate it would have been a rout of biblical proportions. I think a lot of anti-Bush folks fooled themselves into thinking that he was a deep thinker--I can't say he ever impressed me in that regard.

As to whether or not Bush or kerry is smarter...I've long believed that when someone kicks your political ass you should HOPE that they are smarter than you are. Otherwise you just got your ass kicked by a moron. Which makes you...what? One reason people--even (or especially) Democrats hold the Democratic party in such low regard is that they have insisted they are smarter than their opponents, even as they lose to these mental pygmies.

The contradiction leads inevitably to phase two--it's the VOTERS who are morons! Yeah, THAT'LL win those hearts and minds! Given what an illogical strategy that is you have to wonder if maybe they aren't operating under a very flase assumption.

But in the end...who cares? Kerry vs Bush has been fought. It's over. I'm sure Kerry wants to try it again but let's not encourage him. If the Democrats nominate this boob one more time it means the Republicans can coast with some empty suit like George Allen, assuming he manages to get his stupid self re-elected.

And for better or worse, our military is more and more made up of people who have no other choice. Who don't have the high school grades to go on to college on free rides, who can't afford tuition, or moving, or a host of other things that block access to education. This has been a huge concern for military higher-ups, this lack of education we see in those enlisting.

Boy, That has so not been my experience. And I'm pretty sure I've seen statistics that show that the military is better educated than the general public. I'll see if I can dig them up.

Kerry was not helped by some of the far left bloggers who immediately lept to his defense by AGREEING with his supposed statement (which they now say was NOT what he meant to say). There is a small but hard-core group of people still stuck in the anti-military mindset. I don't think they represent the left in general but then again some of the folks who are now catching undeserved flack have no trouble holding up Jerry Fallwell as a representative of typical conservatives. Karma's a bitch.

Eh, I'm as anti-Bush as the next guy, but when I heard the statement, I never even conceived that he meant it any other way than "Study hard and get a good job. Otherwise, the military is your only option, which isn't that great a choice these days."

I consider it obvious that our military forces are in the worse shape they've been since Vietnam, that what used to be a good opportunity for someone without many other options has become the choice of absolute last resort, and that the Reserve and National Guard system will take decades to recover from Bush.

I have no problem with Kerry thinking or saying this; indeed, I think more people should do so.

However, when he does so, takes some flak for it, and then tries to spin it as a personal attack on Bush (which even the version he now claims he was trying to say doesn't strike me as all that funny), Kerry deserves all the flak he's taking.

Posted by: Bill Mulligan at November 1, 2006 11:01 AM

Bill Myers, I'm not going to argue that Bush's handling of the war hasn't been a tremendous mess. But I think that kerry ran the most inept campaign ever--and I've seen Dole, Mondale and Dukakis, so I've seen inept.

My friend, forgive me, but I fear you are proving my point for me. You pefunctorily acknowledge Bush's flaws when prodded, but you eagerly pounce on Kerry at the slightest opportunity. The liberals in this thread are, of course, doing the reverse.

Again, it's all about circling the wagons, without one iota of discussion about the ideas that supposedly make each side different. It seems as though liberalism and conservatism are no longer labels for meaningful belief systems but are instead names for warring gangs who are fighting over nothing more meaningful than turf.

Posted by: Bill Mulligan at November 1, 2006 11:01 AM

But in the end...who cares?

Well, obviously, you do, as you've devoted quite a bit of thought and energy to explaining why Kerry is the bigger dud.

Personally, I think George W. Bush is the worst president we've had in decades. I think Ronald Reagan, the elder Bush, and Clinton were all far superior presidents. My disdain for him transcends party politics and personalities. It's about the paucity of his ideas, and the horrendous results of his stupidity.

I don't like Kerry, either, Bill. In fact, I'm not sure I like any of the likely Democratic presidential wanna-be's. I'm a liberal and a registered Democrat but I'm very willing to consider voting for McCain.

Yet it seems like I'm in very tiny minority. It seems as though both liberals and conservatives would rather continue to turn a blind eye to what's wrong with "their guys" and an equally blind eye to what's right with "the other guys."

You know, there was actually a time when ideologies were about ideation.

But the whole point of the matter is that Kerry was right - the lack of education means that a decent salary (and health benefits) is in the military. That nowdays means Iraq. If they get home okay, it also means a college education with a bit of help from the military that they served in. I am not exactly left leaning, but I understood what the man said - and I don't have a full college education either. I tried to join the Navy during peacetime, but could not meet qualifications, BTW.

We. Are. At. War.

And this is the tagline of the Bush Administration.

We are at war.

Which is why our government should have Gitmo.
Why they should allow torture.
Why they should have secret CIA prisons.
Why they should be allowed to wiretap American citizens.
Why they should be allowed to suspend habeus corpus.
Why you should not question our government.

Should I go on?

"We are at war" is the Bush defense for all of the above and much more.

And it's why I don't buy into it.

One would think that, having served his 3 months in Vietnam, Kerry couldn't possibly have been slamming the military. He certainly didn't exhibit any of those feelings when he came back from overseas and testified before congress. No sirree.

He wasn’t slamming the military over Vietnam but rather the policy. What’s the problem? (And if you're refering to the "abuse" issue, well he wasn't wrong was he?)

Of course, if he was making an education joke about the President, it might have made more of an impact if Kerry had pulled down better grades than Bush did.

This canard again? Bush averaged a 78 and Kerry a 77, and that’s because Kerry bombed out with a bunch of Ds his first year but rallied with much higher marks later. Bush coasted on mediocrity and (arguably) “gentlemen’s Cs” his entire college career. Bush hasn’t displayed any significant intellectual curiosity or critical ability since Yale. There’s a reason he’s occasionally derided as the “faith-based” president.

Personally, I think Kerry knew what he said, knew how it would be interpreted, and did it to "take one for the team" and thus start lathering up the base. But then, maybe I'm just giving him too much credit.

And just what formidable base would he trying to lather? Please . . .

But more importantly, what does any of this have to do with midterms? Neither Kerry or Bush are running and his personal comments really have nothing to do with the current state of affairs.

Posted by: Craig J. Ries at November 1, 2006 11:40 AM

Should I go on?

No, because what you've said is irrelevant. I've never advocated any of the things in your list, and acknowledging that we are at war does not force you to accept that torture is a necessity. It doesn't even force you to support Bush.

Posted by: Craig J. Ries at November 1, 2006 11:40 AM

"We are at war" is the Bush defense for all of the above and much more.

And it's why I don't buy into it.

Don't buy into what?

All I did was articulate a documented fact: we're at war. In both Iraq and Afghanistan. Are you telling me that's not the case?

Are you telling me that's not the case?

Your comment leads to the line of thinking of how dare we discuss other things in life because we are at war, that we should think of nothing else.

Which is what Bush has been all about.

If I were in your shoes, I certainly wouldn't be using a Bush tagline as a means of supporting an argument, regardless of how far removed from Bush is seems to be.

The most pathetic thing about this, is that Kerry said this when he was stumping for a guy that doesn't have a chance. Specifically, he was campaiging for Phil Angelides, the Democratic candidate for California govenor. Schwarznegger is leading by double digits, and the Democrat nominee, Phil Angelides, really doesn't have a chance. The guy's a weenie, and his own party isn't really backing him. So Kerry potentially hurt his party for nothing. Big mouth, with an even bigger foot.

Posted by: Craig J. Ries at November 1, 2006 12:06 PM

Your comment leads to the line of thinking of how dare we discuss other things in life because we are at war, that we should think of nothing else.

To be fair, I never used the phrase "how dare we." I merely expressed amazement that we are arguing over Kerry's syntax while the nation is at war.

If you'd like, choose another issue of national or global importance: the economy, embryonic stem cell research, pollution, whatever. I'd argue that there are a host of other issues that deserve attention far more than Kerry's gaffe. I believe my point still stands, even if you remove the "drumbeat of war" and substitute another problem of pressing significance.

Posted by: Craig J. Ries at November 1, 2006 12:06 PM

If I were in your shoes, I certainly wouldn't be using a Bush tagline as a means of supporting an argument, regardless of how far removed from Bush is seems to be.

I guess I'd rather not shy away from advancing what seems to me to be a rational argument merely because it superficially resembles something the "opposition" said.

To be fair, I never used the phrase "how dare we."

No, you didn't, but you did say "it amazes me", which isn't that far removed.

Yeah, I'm pretty pissed about the situation in Iraq as well, but I can't see how emphasising the whole "we are at war" helps your position. Maybe it's just me.

I guess I'd rather not shy away from advancing what seems to me to be a rational argument merely because it superficially resembles something the "opposition" said.

Well, half the battle is that war leads to irrationality from all sides - that has been pretty evident in any discussion involving Iraq.

I just don't think you can go around throwing out "we are at war" line without it involving the details of why we are involved in the war, and what has happened as a result of the war.

Yes, "we are at war" evokes the whole triviality of other things, but it also evokes the hard questions which are, contrary to what you say, very relevent imo.

Here is a quote by Bush.

"However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses,"

If the Democrats win, the terrorist win. You don't find this more outragous than a botched joke?

1

Peter,

The report is that the joke WAS scripted for Kerry and it read something like, "You know what happens if you don't do your home work and don't study in school? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq."

Bob

Posted by: Craig J. Ries at November 1, 2006 12:24 PM

Yes, "we are at war" evokes the whole triviality of other things, but it also evokes the hard questions which are, contrary to what you say, very relevent imo.

Craig, the issues you brought up are very relevant in any discussion about the war. They were merely irrelevant to the only point I was trying to make: that we have more important things to discuss than Kerry's syntax. That's it. No more. No less.

I've never argued in favor of torture, or wiretapping, or any of that crap.

Again, I was merely trying to point out that Kerry's gaffe is pretty trivial compared to the other stuff we need to discuss.

And my amazement is just that: amazement. I would never presume to question how people "dare" to choose to discuss this or that. I may express an opinion about it, but I would never question their right to have the discussion. I believe very passionately that freedom of speech is the very foundation of our democracy.

Craig, the way I read Bill's initial post was that this whole thing with Kerry's joke/not-joke isn't what everyone in DC should be worrying about while American troops are overseas fighting. I don't think, the way I read it, that the fact "We. Are. At. War." is meant to give a free pass to anything that you named. But again, that's just the way I read it.

The thing that's really dangerous with any "news reporting" is that you don't seem to get the COMPLETE story. This particular story illustrates that REALLY well. Taken just on it's own, without either the rest of Kerry's speech around it or the context in which it was said, it would seem that Kerry is slamming the troops and cutting on their intellect. Every report that I've seen is a reactionary "OOOOH! Did you hear what Kerry said about the troops?" story, not "Here's the speech, here's all of what he said." For an historical allegory, think of the Gettysburg Address. If all the reporters then had only focused on the first line, the reports would've been "Lincoln ignores death in Pennsylvania, only worried about how old the country is." There are too many pundits on too many networks scrambling around to get their own POV across.

He wasn’t slamming the military over Vietnam but rather the policy.

I don't know...an awful lot of vets felt differently. It's a sore point at any rate and a smarter man would be careful not to feed the perception of animus.

Bush averaged a 78 and Kerry a 77, and that’s because Kerry bombed out with a bunch of Ds his first year but rallied with much higher marks later.

If he had just one more semester! But, life is what it is and he will just have to live with having a lower GPA than George Bush. You snooze, you lose. Maybe he should have used himself as an example to the students.

But the whole point of the matter is that Kerry was right - the lack of education means that a decent salary (and health benefits) is in the military. That nowdays means Iraq.

So is Kerry lying now when he tries to blame others for deliberately misinterpreting him? Hell, I don't even like the guy but I'm willing to take his word for it that it was a lame joke awkwardly delivered. Your interpretation make him every bit the military basher his opponents call him and a liar to boot.

You pefunctorily acknowledge Bush's flaws when prodded, but you eagerly pounce on Kerry at the slightest opportunity.

Probably so, but why can't I have some fun? A fellow can call Bush President Chimpy McHitlerburton with nary a word of protest raised but I playfully suggest that Kerry is dumb as a paperbag full of fog and suddenly I'm the problem? Huh! Fair and balanced my fanny...

Besides, I want to try to stop y'all from nominating him again. It's for your own good. Don't tell me you won't, I know you guys. Slept with Dean, married Kerry, woke up with Bush...

Your comment leads to the line of thinking of how dare we discuss other things in life because we are at war, that we should think of nothing else.

Craig, that's not fair to Bill at all. The comment is what it is, it doesn't lead to anything. You're making a huge leap.

If I were in your shoes, I certainly wouldn't be using a Bush tagline as a means of supporting an argument, regardless of how far removed from Bush is seems to be.

Blindly rejecting something because Bush may agree with it is as bad as blindly accepting it for the same reason.

Bill Myers -
Again, I was merely trying to point out that Kerry's gaffe is pretty trivial compared to the other stuff we need to discuss.

Alright. I guess I read too much into it. I just don't like the phrase in general (obviously).

Bill Mulligan -
Maybe he should have used himself as an example to the students.

You're right, he should have: as just one example, he speaks far more intelligently than Bush, which just goes to show how little an Ivy League education means with some people.

It certainly means very little with George "Is our children learning" Bush.

Blindly rejecting something because Bush may agree with it is as bad as blindly accepting it for the same reason.

I reject it, but I far from do it blindly, which makes the premise of your argument pretty flawed.

Taking Kerry's comment at face value, without knowing or bothering to check the context of it would be doing so blindly.

But knowing what the phrase "We are at war" means, and how it has been used by politicians? No, that is not blind acceptance or rejection, not in the least.

Posted by: Bill Mulligan at November 1, 2006 12:50 PM

Probably so, but why can't I have some fun? A fellow can call Bush President Chimpy McHitlerburton with nary a word of protest raised but I playfully suggest that Kerry is dumb as a paperbag full of fog and suddenly I'm the problem? Huh! Fair and balanced my fanny...

Bill, I never singled you out as "the problem" in any way, shape, or form. I was taking to task liberals and conservatives. Did I not point out that liberals are as soft on Kerry as conversatives are on Rumsfeld for their respective gaffes? Did I not say I was considering a vote for McCain for president (assuming he gets the Republican nomination)?

I really am trying to argue about ideas. It's not personal. I hope you're not taking it that way.

Posted by: Bill Mulligan at November 1, 2006 12:50 PM

Don't tell me you won't, I know you guys. Slept with Dean, married Kerry, woke up with Bush...

And Republicans turned their noses up at McCain in favor of Bush, even though McCain would likely have handled the war on terror with more resolve, courage, wisdom, and intelligence than Bush could ever hope to bring to bear. I've said it before, I'll say it again: neither party has reason to feel smug these days.

Some more right wingers piling on poor Johnny K:

Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr., running for Senate in Tennessee

Democratic Rep. Ben Cardin, running for Senate in Maryland

Kerry campaign appearances in Iowa, Minnesota and Pennsylvania were canceled.

A spokesman for Democratic congressional candidate Bruce Braley in Iowa said Braley had decided independently to cancel an event with Kerry scheduled for Thursday.

Kerry spokesman David Wade confirmed he no longer would appear at a Philadelphia rally on Wednesday for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bob Casey

"Sen. Kerry's remarks were poorly worded and just plain stupid," said Montana Senate President Jon Tester, a Democrat trying to unseat GOP Sen. Conrad Burns. "He owes our troops and their families an apology."

All he had to do was admit at the very beginning that he misspoke and move on. But he is so fixated on not appearing weak that he overreacted, attacked, attacked, attacked, and looked like the last possible person who should ever be president.

If--and I would rate this as INCREDIBLY unlikely--the Republicans manage to keep the House, Kerry should just pack it up. He will get the blame, fair or not. (and if the Democrats manage to lose this one they will be LIVID. Ready to form a circular firing squad. Heads will roll. I know one Senator who will be watching the results very very carefully.

All he had to do was admit at the very beginning that he misspoke and move on.

There's an article up on Yahoo atm saying that Kerry has apologized (sort of). It has the following:

""I said it was a botched joke. Of course, I'm sorry about a botched joke," Kerry, who had refused to apologize on Tuesday, said on the "Imus in the Morning" radio show on MSNBC."

Probably as close as your going to get, with news places referring to this as "Kerry apologizes".

And, it shouldn't shock anybody if the political response to this is "that's not good enough".

As for the Democratic response, well, I can only shake my head. They, just like the Republicans, are more than willing to fall overthemslves to stab a fellow in the back if it gains them political points.

and if the Democrats manage to lose this one they will be LIVID.

Well, they'd have only themselves to blame. Not Kerry, but themselves as a whole.

And Republicans turned their noses up at McCain in favor of Bush, even though McCain would likely have handled the war on terror with more resolve, courage, wisdom, and intelligence than Bush could ever hope to bring to bear.

I know, I know...I never back the winning guy. Hopefully McCain will get another crack at it.

(in fairness to the republicans who did not support MCain, I suspect the result might have been very different if there had been a war on at the time of the nomination race).

I'm not taking any of this personal, don't worry about me. With all the good stuff happening these last few weeks I'm giddy as a schoolgirl (nothing to do with politics, thank God). Anyway, I know you so even if you insulted me to my face I'd just assume it was with a smile (ok, there's your opportunity...)

I think that kerry ran the most inept campaign ever...The campaign is your entrance exam. It's the test you take to show you are smart enough for the job.

I have to disagree.

The campaign is most emphatically NOT an "entrance exam" for the Presidency. As Iraq, Katrina, et al, have shown, brilliance in the former does not translate in any way to even marginal competence in the latter.
The GOP is frighteningly competent at winning elections. The fact that this talent is largely based on negativity (character assassination, mudslinging, distortions, rallying voters through appeals to bigotry, etc) notwithstanding.

Unfortunately, when it comes to actually GOVERNING, the ability to throw massive amounts of feces at one's political opponents is largely useless, and this administration doesn't seem to have anything else up its collective sleeve.

As to whether or not Bush or kerry is smarter...I've long believed that when someone kicks your political ass you should HOPE that they are smarter than you are. Otherwise you just got your ass kicked by a moron.

But no one is saying that GWB himself is smarter than Kerry. Bush's intelligence, or lack thereof, is completely irrelevant, at least to the results of the last two elections.
Karl Rove is another matter. I would rate his evil genius on a par with that of Doctor Doom.

"Yet it seems like I'm in very tiny minority. It seems as though both liberals and conservatives would rather continue to turn a blind eye to what's wrong with "their guys" and an equally blind eye to what's right with "the other guys.""

Well, I can't speak for other liberals, but you're posting on the blog of the guy who said, three months before the 2004 election, that Kerry had blown it by saying that, if he had it to do all over again, knowing now what he did then, he'd still have voted for Bush to go into Iraq. That he had just erased any reason for people to see him as an alternative to Bush, and therefore Bush was going to win, period, end of discussion. And I've expressed great frustration with the Democrats on numerous occasions.

The report is that the joke WAS scripted for Kerry and it read something like, "You know what happens if you don't do your home work and don't study in school? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq."

Which is basically what I said it should be if he wanted to use "you" in the sentence. Nice to know my comedy instincts are solid.

PAD

Bill Mulligan: "If he had just one more semester! But, life is what it is and he will just have to live with having a lower GPA than George Bush. You snooze, you lose. Maybe he should have used himself as an example to the students."

Which completely ignores the very relevant point. In regards to grades, Kerry peaked higher than Bush. End of story and end of your dismissal of intelligence.

Bill Mulligan: "The campaign is your entrance exam. It's the test you take to show you are smart enough for the job. He flunked, spctacularly."

Spectacularly? Really? How close was that election again? Furthermore, the results of a campaign can be used to measure intelligence now? Absolute nonsense. Seriously, that is simply absurd "logic".

Someone back up there said: "Traditionally, the strong left is not a fan of the military."

To which I can only ask, what would an American know about the "strong left"? In any other western democracy, the average Democrat would be a centrist, and some would be center-right. You don't have a left any more, because the last 25 years have seen the right-wingers dragging politics and discourse farther and farther right. You can barely see the center, and the left is way behind, out of sight.

>Posted by: lucasb at November 1, 2006 01:22 PM

>But no one is saying that GWB himself is smarter than Kerry. Bush's intelligence, or lack thereof, is completely irrelevant, at least to the results of the last two elections.

See below.

>>Posted by: Bill Mulligan at November 1, 2006 09:33 AM
>Because--and I know this hurts--he's smarter than Kerry. Faint praise but there you are.

Dispite providing this piece of Bill's to respond to your erroneous statement, I can say without a moment's hesitation that Bill is smarter than both of the two mentioned above.

Posted by: Peter David at November 1, 2006 01:35 PM

Well, I can't speak for other liberals, but you're posting on the blog of the guy who said, three months before the 2004 election, that Kerry had blown it by saying that, if he had it to do all over again, knowing now what he did then, he'd still have voted for Bush to go into Iraq. That he had just erased any reason for people to see him as an alternative to Bush, and therefore Bush was going to win, period, end of discussion. And I've expressed great frustration with the Democrats on numerous occasions.

Fair enough. When I referred to "the liberals in this thread" I was making an overly broad generalization and I apologize. I likewise apologize for making overly broad generalizations about conservatives.

Nevertheless, I believe the "circling the wagons" mentality is pervasive, and probably the majority pattern these days. I find it frustrating. Still, that's no excuse for stereotyping.

Posted by: Peter David at November 1, 2006 01:35 PM

The report is that the joke WAS scripted for Kerry and it read something like, "You know what happens if you don't do your home work and don't study in school? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq."

Which is basically what I said it should be if he wanted to use "you" in the sentence. Nice to know my comedy instincts are solid.

I didn't realize there was any question that your comedy instincts were solid. Years ago, you wrote a satirical piece about the "Sabretooth slur" (for those who are unaware: I'm referring to a mishap involving an issue of Wolverine years ago where the word "killer" was accidentally replaced with an ethnic slur pertaining to Jews) in the Comics Buyers Guide that caused me to laugh so hard my spleen came out of my nose.

Well? What are you gonna do about replacing my spleen?

The campaign is most emphatically NOT an "entrance exam" for the Presidency. As Iraq, Katrina, et al, have shown, brilliance in the former does not translate in any way to even marginal competence in the latter.

Didn't say it was a good entrance exam. The SAT's may not reflect actual smarts either, but you may not get what you want without a good score. That's how it is.

The Democrats can continue to nominate people who have no ability to get people to vote for them, if they wish to spend a lot of time watching Republicans take the oath of office. Until someone comes up with a new system the ability to campaign will continue to be the only valid test of ability.

Which completely ignores the very relevant point. In regards to grades, Kerry peaked higher than Bush. End of story and end of your dismissal of intelligence.

I would never dismiss intelligence. It is Kerry I take lightly.

Showing improvement may give one a warm feeling inside but for most people it's the end result that matters. Hell, maybe we'll have people come forward and claim that Bush took extra hard courses so his keeping a C average was better than getting an A in an easy course...we at Washigton University used to tell ourselves that a C there was worth an A at most schools. Yeah, you come up with all sorts of great lines when you drink enough beer.

Anyway, Kerry's grades wouldn't have been such a big deal if his supporters hadn't tried to make such a big deal out of his (in retrospect) rather modest gifts. Having it turn out that he had a LOWER average than the guy they had portrayed as possibly the Dumbest Man Not In A Coma...well, c'mon, you have to appreciate the irony.

To which I can only ask, what would an American know about the "strong left"? In any other western democracy, the average Democrat would be a centrist, and some would be center-right. You don't have a left any more, because the last 25 years have seen the right-wingers dragging politics and discourse farther and farther right. You can barely see the center, and the left is way behind, out of sight.

Our right wingers aren't much compared to the average European's either. Yep, when it comes to political extremism Europe has us whipped. Oh well, our loss is our gain.

Actually, something occured to me in this with what PAD said in his original posting:

"Kerry SHOULD have said "we.""

That actually ruins the whole joke (aside from the fact that Kerry blew it).

If Kerry said "we end up in Iraq", then he's insulting his own intelligence by including himself in the target of the joke.

Kerry said "you", in reference to Bush, since he wasn't making himself a target of the joke.

So, he was correct in what he said. What he should've done is said "You get stuck in Iraq, just like Bush".

Oh, I think your extremist right wingers can be pretty proud of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the whole damn Iraq war, and getting rid of habeus corpus, for a start.

Oh, and there's more to the western world than the USA and Europe.

But through it all Amricans never lost their sense of humor...

http://www.620wtmj.com/images/uploaded/Help%20Photo20061101105508.JPG

If this had been Bill Clinton he would have already turned it into a self depreciating joke that would have diffused the anger. It's probably too late now.

Okay, there was something said above that gets right up my left nostril, every time I hear it.

Listen up, folks.

We. Are. NOT. At. War.

Sure, our President has committed our forces to fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his loyal lapdogs in Congress lack the testicular fortitude to call him on it, but -

The US Constitution says that CONGRESS gets to declare war. Not the President. That's why FDR had to use outrage over the Pearl Harbor attack, and the fact that Japan had signed a treaty with Germany, to get the US involved in WWII. He couldn't do it himself - it took Congress.

That's why Vietnam wasn't fought as a war - and believe it, if Nixon had had the power to declare war on his own, the Ho Chi Minh Trail would have been reduced to glowing slag.

Congress gave Bush authorization to use force to pursue those responsible for the 9/11 attacks - and Bush and his backers (I blame the backers more, as I doubt Bush is smart enough to have thought of this on his own) parlayed that into an undeclared "war" in Iraq.

BUT CONGRESS NEVER ISSUED A DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR.

Of course, little things like the Constitution don't seem to matter much in today's political climate...

If this country is one botched joke away from leaving the government as is then I don't blame Kerry. If we let this rule the day we deserve whatever knuckledragging puppet show we get as a Congress.

The "joke" should have been "study hard or you'll end up being ignorant like the fool who got us stuck in Iraq and brags about his lousy GPA".

The apology is "anyone who would insult the troops is an ass. I didn't and I wouldn't. THey wish to hell I did so they would have a straw to grasp at before we kick their asses down to minority party status."

Lots more use of the word "ass" from the Democrats, I say. Shows the gloves are off and goes with the whole donkey motif. Damn thing's a WWE sdeshow anyway - time to grab a chair and start swinging back!

"How do you view Senator Kerry's remark?
A deliberate insult 58%
A botched joke 34%
I'm not sure 9%"

I'd be willing to bet that most of that 58% voted for Bush instead of Kerry in the last election. I doubt this is a case of people being stupid enough to believe that Kerry would insult the troops. This is probably a case of people being stupid enough to believe anything that fits with the view of Kerry that they already had, regardless of the details.

Posted by Bill Mulligan at November 1, 2006 02:41 PM

Didn't say it was a good entrance exam.

True. In fact, it is a very, very poor entrance exam, to the point of being essentially worthless.

As has been amply demonstrated.

SAT's measure (imperfectly) one's intelligence and ability to correctly answer test questions, both of which are highly relevant to completing a college education.

The correlation between successfully conducting an election campaign, and successfully carrying out the duties of the Presidency, is FAR more tenuous.

A better comparison might be the use of a popularity contest as a determination for eligibilty to attend a prestigious university.

But through it all Amricans never lost their sense of humor...

Well, thankfully not. Here's a wonderful take on something we should be far more upset about. :)

http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/uc/20061101/ltt061101.gif

Posted by: Jonathan (the other one) at November 1, 2006 02:58 PM

We. Are. NOT. At. War.

No. That's false.

According to the Microsoft Encarta dictionary, war is "an an armed conflict between countries or groups that involves killing and destruction." The armed conflicts we are waging in Iraq and Afghanistan meet that definition.

You are conflating the legal mechanism for declaring war with the reality of waging it.

Please note I never said we were engaged in a war legally declared by Congress. I merely said we are at war.

Dumb question:

What does "GOP" stand for? What is it's role? Is it equivalent to the Lower House of Parliament (in a bi-cameral system), or is it something different?

"Congress gave Bush authorization to use force to pursue those responsible for the 9/11 attacks - and Bush and his backers (I blame the backers more, as I doubt Bush is smart enough to have thought of this on his own) parlayed that into an undeclared "war" in Iraq.

BUT CONGRESS NEVER ISSUED A DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR."

And even if we had been officially at war with Iraq, didn't Bush declare "mission accomplished".
There was a time that would have suggested that the war was over. Just a thought.

JAC

What does "GOP" stand for?

Grand Old Party.

No, I didn't know off the top of my head, I used Wiki. Personally, I find it an an anachronism, as the Republicans today don't really qualify as 'grand'. :)

Wasn't regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy since... when was that again? Anyone? Bueller?

"Grand Old Party" was also coined as an ironic statement, given that the Republicans were only about a generation old at the time, youngsters compared to the Democrats, or the dearly departed Federalist and Whig parties.

For those for whom the above link doesn't work, you can see the same image here: http://www.drudgereport.com/irak.jpg

Bill Mulligan: "The Democrats can continue to nominate people who have no ability to get people to vote for them"

Again, how close was the last presidential election? How about the one before that?

Bill Mulligan: "I would never dismiss intelligence. It is Kerry I take lightly."

Few people rise to the position that either George Bush or John Kerry have. How much of the vote in the last presidential election did Kerry garner again? Anyone who can rally such a large percentage of voters is worth taking seriously. And yes, I apply this whether the individual in question is Republican or Democrat.

Bill Mulligan: "Showing improvement may give one a warm feeling inside but for most people it's the end result that matters."

End result: Kerry peaked at a higher grade level than Bush. You hold a one point grade point average difference up as proof that Bush is smarter than Kerry? But that proof falls apart under even casual scrutiny.

End result: Kerry peaked at a higher grade level than Bush. You hold a one point grade point average difference up as proof that Bush is smarter than Kerry? But that proof falls apart under even casual scrutiny.

No, I don't hold up Bush's GPA as proof that he is smarter than Kerry. But Those who chortled over Bush's grades while Kerry's were hidden certainly don't look so bright now, do they?

How Kerry did in college is of no relevance at all, really. Too bad his supporters set him up for the fall (Kerry would have been smart to have maybe toned down the rhetoric--maybe said something along the lines of "It really doesn't matter how the two of us did in our classes in Yale. What really matters is how far we have grown since then." or something to that effect.)

The fact that Kerry's dwindling band of defenders STILL try to spin his grades as indicative of some level of superiority shows just how deeply the revelation of his sub-Bush achievement cut. Again, it's no big deal...except to those who made it one.

When I say that Kerry ran an incompetant campaign I mean it. The reasone he lost were so easily avoidable. Go back and reread some of what was written and said back then, there was a palpable sense of amazement at how he was blowing it. I could pick 5 people off of this board who would have almost undoubtedly done a better job of getting the message out than the so-called professionals did in the Kerry campaign. And for a lot of folks, seeing such rank incompetance doesn't inspire the kind of confidence that induces one to go cast a vote to put that person in charge.

Just flipping through channels as I sit here waiting for my wife to come home so we can figure out what to do for dinner. Happened to zip past Fox News, then thought I'd look in to see what THEY said was happening. Cavuto had on four people with kids in Iraq and they were all pounding on Kerry for his statement. Then one of them said something that I thought was telling. He said that even had he directed the line at the president, THAT would be disrespecting the troops. Now, i thought that was interesting. Kind of like no matter WHAT gets said it deserves vilification if its against, you know, anything. It reminds me a little of the Captain Underpants thread, where someone who will remain nameless(but we all know who it is) was taking every post as being directed RIGHT AT HIM.

Some people walk around with this air of "He's the president, everything he does is right and anything anyone else does is wrong." No matter who he is, the president, to borrow a phrase from Adams,(Douglas, not John)is "just this guy, y'know?" I'd love to see something Bush has said picked apart this much and have everyone and their mothers demanding an apology.

...the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses...

The reason Bush doesn't get hung by his gaffs the way Kerry gets hung by "If you don't [study hard], you get stuck in Iraq," is because democrats don't offer obvious summaries of their positions. I said as much last year.

In their own self-interest, the conservatives here disagreed this was the case. The liberals, including Peter, refused to believe it also. The obvious thesis is what shelters Bush. It's a shelter the liberals refuse to occupy.

Posted by: Sean Scullion at November 1, 2006 04:28 PM

It reminds me a little of the Captain Underpants thread, where someone who will remain nameless(but we all know who it is) was taking every post as being directed RIGHT AT HIM.

HUH? WAS THAT A CRACK AT ME? HUH? WAS IT?

And I want my blue sock back, you bastard.

:-)

Eeeesh! Calm down, Bill! I was actually talking someone else who was reacting just like you did now actually at everything YOU said.

And as long as I hold the sock, I AM IN CONTROL!

Or rather, THE CLOTHESPIN ON MY NOSE IS IN CONTROL!

Kind of like no matter WHAT gets said it deserves vilification if its against, you know, anything.

Sort of like how a group of defensive white guys will jump on you if you compare something one of them said to the Merriam-Webster definition of genocide.

Posted by: SeanScullion at November 1, 2006 05:12 PM

Eeeesh! Calm down, Bill! I was actually talking someone else who was reacting just like you did now actually at everything YOU said.

I know. I was just kidding. :-)

And as long as I hold the sock, I AM IN CONTROL!

Or rather, THE CLOTHESPIN ON MY NOSE IS IN CONTROL!

I told you to burn that damn thing.

Anyhoo...

With regards to the respective intellectual skills of Kerry and Bush, I think people are forgetting that "intellect" can comprise a number of different cognitive skills. John Kerry is a highly analytical person, and this has its advantages. Unfortunately, highly analytical people are sometimes more indecisive than your average Joe because they see more dimensions of a problem than the rest of us do. It's also been my experience that highly analytical people often lack "people skills." Hence, John Kerry is a smart man but a poor political candidate.

George W. Bush has "people skills," to be sure. He's also not very analytical, and is thus quick to make up his mind and to act. Hence, George W. Bush was a fair-to-middling political candidate (a stronger opponent may have torn him to shreds, I suspect) but an appallingly poor leader who has made some awful decisions with tragic consequences for this nation.

Really great leaders tend to have the ability to analyze a situation, but know when to stop thinking and start acting. And they have the communicative gifts to persuade others to follow.

Seriously, if you combine George W. Bush with John Kerry, you get an almost acceptable president. An ugly one, mind you, but an almost acceptable one.

It reminds me a little of the Captain Underpants thread, where someone who will remain nameless(but we all know who it is) was taking every post as being directed RIGHT AT HIM.

Sort of like how a group of defensive white guys will jump on you if you compare something one of them said to the Merriam-Webster definition of genocide.

The Goddess of Irony smiles upon us once again.

meanwhile, Kerry issued a real apology: "I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform and I personally apologize to any service member, family member or American who was offended."

That wasn't so hard, now was it? Hopefully people will lay off now. Apologies should be respected if sincere and I have no doubt that he is genuinely sorry.

I don't know who the bigger idiots are out there. Are they the people who want to claim that Kerry slammed the troops (even after seeing the 45 seconds or so of Bush knocking before/leading into his joke) or the writers who thought that Kerry could pull of a joke like.

It reminds me a little of the Captain Underpants thread, where someone who will remain nameless (but we all know who it is) was taking every post as being directed RIGHT AT HIM.

Bill Mulligan, I wasn't going to take this as a line referring to me, because it wasn't observably true for me. If you want to cite an exchange in that thread, please do so.

Bill, you know there are serious consequences for burning that kind of waste, don't you?

I have to agree with Sean, Bill Mulligan. You are way better off admitting you signed a check with your mouth your butt couldn't cash.

If this one little thing winds up causing the Republicans to maintain control of both chambers of Congress I have no idea what I'm going to wind up doing in my state of extreme emotional distress but I can virtually guarantee it won't be pleasant.

Only masochists or psychopaths actually want to be in Iraq right now, and the military has been lowering its standards on who it will accept for a while now, meaning that it's one of the few jobs some people are qualified for. So yes, if you drop out of school you just may wind up "stuck in Iraq." Describing it as an undesirable fate, as Kerry did, is not blasphemy or anything. Seems like even the slightest little thing gets blown out of proportion these days whenever anybody refers to the military.

Near the beginning of this year, Joel Stein wrote a column in which he stated his belief that saying "I support the troops but I don't support the war" is a copout. I partially agree with him. Me, I do not support the war and I do not support anybody who believes the war is right. If some of the troops believe the war is right even today, then I say fuck them. They aren't deserving of my support, respect or the planet's oxygen.

Unless someone has better information, Studio 60 is still being aired.

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=50417

And for the original source, you can thank Druge Report for yet more quality reporting...

Only masochists or psychopaths actually want to be in Iraq right now

I'm still trying to decide between those which one my brother is.

No-one went after Rumsfeld for *his* remarks about the soldiers in Iraq

Don't forget "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want". There's a statement that truly insults the troops.

Near the beginning of this year, Joel Stein wrote a column in which he stated his belief that saying "I support the troops but I don't support the war" is a copout. I partially agree with him. Me, I do not support the war and I do not support anybody who believes the war is right. If some of the troops believe the war is right even today, then I say fuck them. They aren't deserving of my support, respect or the planet's oxygen.

Supporting the troops by opposing the war is not a copout. Every soldier takes an oath to place the constitution above his own life, and it isn't done casually. That dedication is being squandered to feed the insurgency. It's simply the conservation of an endangered national resource.

I'm not sure why it would be stupid for people to think Kerry is dissing the troops. After all, he did make this comment on Face the Nation back on Dec. 4, 2005:

KERRY: And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs. Whether you like it or not...

SCHIEFFER: Yeah.

Sen. KERRY: ...Iraqis should be doing that.

I'm sure Kerry would maintain that he was criticizing Bush, but for such a sweeping statement to be true, Bush would have to be micromanaging the war to the extent that terrorizing the entire civilian population is official policy, something a soldier would be thrown out of the military for *not* doing.

We'd also be seeing a lot of more of those Haditha-style controversies -- the Haditha incident took place around the time of Kerry's remarks and might be what he was referring to. But we're not. Those incidents are so rare that the only explanation is insubordination on the part of the soldier.

Is Kerry really saying that most of our soldiers are ticking time bombs? Sounds like it -- maybe Kerry views today's soldiers as the same sort of soldiers he served with (and later denounced) in Vietnam. Who knows but Kerry himself?

I'm not sure why Kerry thinks its OK for *Iraqis* to terrorize kids and women in the dead of night, but that's a different headache, and one I'm not going to invite upon myself.

However, if the argument is that Kerry would never slander the troops because he used to be in the military, then that requires explaining the situation of Congressman John Murtha, a veteran and the Democrats' point-man in the House when it comes to anti-war talk. After all, he did pronounce the soldiers accused in the Haditha incident guilty while the military investiagtion was still taking place, calling it a "massacre." You would think a veteran would respect the military enough not to play judge and jury on matters the military has yet to settle.

At any rate, I don't think it's stupid to question Kerry on this. Maybe it was an ineptly delivered joke. Who knows? Still, that would mean that Kerry's "Bush is dumb" crack had the end result of making Kerry himself look dumb.
And this is good how, exactly?

-Dave OConnell

SeanScullion:
And as long as I hold the sock, I AM IN CONTROL!
Or rather, THE CLOTHESPIN ON MY NOSE IS IN CONTROL!

Bill Myers
I told you to burn that damn thing.

SeanScullion:
Bill, you know there are serious consequences for burning that kind of waste, don't you?

MikeMcTroll:
I have to agree with Sean, Bill Mulligan. You are way better off admitting you signed a check with your mouth your butt couldn't cash.

Um...unless I'm really misreading things, Sean was in no way commenting about you. Or me. He was having a funny exchange with Bill Myers, which you somehow thought was about you. Which is so funny on so many levels.

What a sad, humorless little man you are. Now listen carefully, Mike. I'm going to ignore you. Again. And every post you make trying to get me to not ignore you will make you look ever more sad and pathetic. You can feel free to aim one more post at me so you can have the last word--which is obviously very important to you for whatever reasons there are that made you what you are. Say what you wish. Make it a challenge so you can pretend I backed down before your protean wisdom. Whatever. You're good for a laugh but the joke gets old with the constant retelling.

Even as a Republican, I don't think Kerry meant to deliberately slam troops in the field. I also don't really buy the "botched joke" - like it was something pre-planned. I think he tried to make a tongue-in-cheek jest and it blew up in his face. His mistake was not admitting the screw-up and apologizing quicker.

On the flip side, Limbaugh apologized to Michael J. Fox within the same broadcast of his off-the-cuff comment, and no one paid attention to that apology either.

Maybe this was a Rovian stroke by Kerry after all. He lays out the line, gets in the administration's face for days - shoring up his anti-war credentials - then finally apologizes.

Of course, I doubt Kerry is that smart, either. :)

[Sean] It reminds me a little of the Captain Underpants thread, where someone who will remain nameless (but we all know who it is) was taking every post as being directed RIGHT AT HIM.

...

[My quote Bill Mulligan matched with Sean's] Sort of like how a group of defensive white guys will jump on you if you compare something one of them said to the Merriam-Webster definition of genocide.

The Goddess of Irony smiles upon us once again.

Bill Mulligan, I wasn't going to take this as a line referring to me, because it wasn't observably true for me. If you want to cite an exchange in that thread, please do so.

Bill, you know there are serious consequences for burning that kind of waste, don't you?

I have to agree with Sean, Bill Mulligan. You are way better off admitting you signed a check with your mouth your butt couldn't cash.

Uh, yeah, I can thread quotes too, Bill Mulligan.

The mistake to deny is still yours, unsurprisingly.

Mike, first off, I'M the one that said that, not Bill Mulligan. I mean, confusing the Bills between Myers and Mulligan is one thing, but I'm not Bill. And second, the waste I was talking about burning was Bill Myers' blue sock that I told him I had in the Presidential News Conference thread.

Second off, if I attirbuted something to you that you didn't say, Iapologize. I kind of stopped reading your posts after you toquote Clesse went a bit silly.

I'm not a Kerry fan. I've always found his behavior like a spoiled brat out of touch with everyday folk. I cannot get past believing his military service was little more than his crossing an item off his "how to get elected" checklist. I've always sensed he had a pathological hatred of military and intelligence. So I hope he gets raked over the coals for his "botched joke" (sic) every which way but loose and through every given Sunday.

I'm more interested in how much Kerry will be blamed for single handedly and in no more than 40 words wiped out the election efforts of the Democratic candidates. For me, I think he has seriously done damage to more than a few candidates and I think he deserves not just the hatred of millions of service personnel but millions more in his own party.

Kerry really is a turd.

There, I said it.

On the flip side, Limbaugh apologized to Michael J. Fox within the same broadcast of his off-the-cuff comment, and no one paid attention to that apology either.

His apology was just as 'off-the-cuff' as his original remarks, and he immediately followed it up with even *more* insults of Fox.

At least Kerry had the good sense not to do that with his apology to the troops today.

So, you tell me, who's the better man? It certainly isn't Limbaugh.

When's the last time Bush apologized for ANYTHING?

Just finished watching another Special Comment from Keith Olbermann. Once again, it was spot on: Bush is the one that needs to be apologizing to our troops, and to this country.

So, you tell me, who's the better man? It certainly isn't Limbaugh.

I wouldn't say that he was. Limbaugh ceased being entertaining to me over 10 years ago. I just find him (and most of the national talk-radio circuit) to just be sad people who like to hear themselves talk too much.

Kinda like most politicians :)

Sean, so you climbed through the tubes of the internet to Bill Mulligan's computer, to match:

It reminds me a little of the Captain Underpants thread, where someone who will remain nameless (but we all know who it is) was taking every post as being directed RIGHT AT HIM.

with:

Sort of like how a group of defensive white guys will jump on you if you compare something one of them said to the Merriam-Webster definition of genocide.

Is that right?

On the flip side, Limbaugh apologized to Michael J. Fox within the same broadcast of his off-the-cuff comment, and no one paid attention to that apology either.

I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act, especially since people are telling me they have seen him this way on other interviews and in other television appearances

Please note the modifier if (emphasis mine). Not much of an apology.

I'm more interested in how much Kerry will be blamed for single handedly and in no more than 40 words wiped out the election efforts of the Democratic candidates. For me, I think he has seriously done damage to more than a few candidates and I think he deserves not just the hatred of millions of service personnel but millions more in his own party.

Bill (Ritter, for those easily confused), I don't think the kerry thing will amount to much. I'll be very surprised if the Democrats don't pick up at least 15-20 seats in the House, probably even 25. House seats are less likely to be influenced by national events and th etrend has been bad for republicans for some time. Keep in mind that many votes have already been cast.

I suppose this may help fire up some Republicans who were content to sit this one out but I just don't see it as changing the outcome much.

The Senate races are more confusing to me, though I'd give the Republicans a narrow liklihood of keeping the Senate or at least making it a 50/50 tie (and boy will you see Democrat leaders suddenly LOVING Joe Lieberman again!).

One advantage of the internet age is that these stories tend to burn out quickly. By next week it's old news.

And if Republicans try to extend Kery's misfortune for too long it will backfire on them.

Sean Scullion--I'm sorry if I've somehow encouraged the nut to turn his attention to you.

Mike, allow me to clear this up for you:

Posted by: Sean Scullion at November 1, 2006 04:28 PM

It reminds me a little of the Captain Underpants thread, where someone who will remain nameless(but we all know who it is) was taking every post as being directed RIGHT AT HIM.

See, Sean originally posted that remark, which was directed at you.

Posted by: Bill Myers at November 1, 2006 04:40 PM

HUH? WAS THAT A CRACK AT ME? HUH? WAS IT?

And I want my blue sock back, you bastard.

:-)

That was a reply from me to Sean. I was pretending to believe that his remark was directed at me. Then I referenced a joke about a blue sock from a prior thread.

Posted by: SeanScullion at November 1, 2006 05:12 PM

Eeeesh! Calm down, Bill! I was actually talking someone else who was reacting just like you did now actually at everything YOU said.

And as long as I hold the sock, I AM IN CONTROL!

Or rather, THE CLOTHESPIN ON MY NOSE IS IN CONTROL!

The above is a reply from Sean to me. Sean is making it clear he is referring to you, even though he isn't naming you. He then continues to play off of the joke about the blue sock.

Posted by: Bill Myers at November 1, 2006 05:31 PM

I know. I was just kidding. :-)

Now I'm reassuring Sean that I know he is joking.

Posted by: Bill Myers at November 1, 2006 05:31 PM

I told you to burn that damn thing.

The above is another reference to the lame joke about the blue sock.

Posted by: Sean Scullion at November 1, 2006 06:51 PM

Bill, you know there are serious consequences for burning that kind of waste, don't you?

The above is from Sean to me. The lame joke about the blue sock continues. (Although Sean and I are enjoying it, lame or not.)

Posted by: Mike at November 1, 2006 07:11 PM

I have to agree with Sean, Bill Mulligan. You are way better off admitting you signed a check with your mouth your butt couldn't cash.

The above is where you begin to go barking mad.

Posted by: Bill Mulligan at November 1, 2006 05:37 PM

It reminds me a little of the Captain Underpants thread, where someone who will remain nameless(but we all know who it is) was taking every post as being directed RIGHT AT HIM.

The above is where Bill Mulligan QUOTES Sean.

Posted by: Mike at November 1, 2006 09:10 PM

Sean, so you climbed through the tubes of the internet to Bill Mulligan's computer

The above is where you now experience a complete psychotic breakdown.

All clear?

By the way, Bill Mulligan, no offense, but if you climbed through the "tubes of the Internet" and poked your head through my computer, I'd whack you with a stick until you turned around and went back where you came from.

It would be a gut reaction. Nothing personal.

Sean Scullion--I'm sorry if I've somehow encouraged the nut to turn his attention to you.

Bill Mulligan, do you mean by making explicit that Sean's chickenshit statement (for which he apologized) was directed at me? By matching it to:

Sort of like how a group of defensive white guys will jump on you if you compare something one of them said to the Merriam-Webster definition of genocide.

Don't beat yourself up to badly, Bill Mulligan. I mean, you tried to build the consensus for it, but he said it.

Mike, allow me to clear this up for you

It reminds me a little of the Captain Underpants thread, where someone who will remain nameless(but we all know who it is) was taking every post as being directed RIGHT AT HIM.

See, Sean originally posted that remark, which was directed at you.

Oh.

Bill Myers, care to cite in the other thread where Sean's chickenshit comment (for which he apologized) applies to me?

Posted by: Bill Mulligan at November 1, 2006 09:27 PM

House seats are less likely to be influenced by national events and the trend has been bad for republicans for some time.

Yeah, I live just outside of Tom Reynolds' district (Lousie Slaughter is my Congressional representative). Reynolds, a Republican, should have had this election sewn up. Unfortunately, he allegedly saw some of Mark Foley's inappropriate e-mails to Congressional pages and has been accused of not doing enough in response. As a result he's neck and neck with a Democratic businessman named Jack Davis. It should be interesting to see what happens.

By the way, Bill Mulligan, no offense, but if you climbed through the "tubes of the Internet" and poked your head through my computer, I'd whack you with a stick until you turned around and went back where you came from.

Judging from the way my "tubes" seem to keep clogging I don't think I'll risk making the trip.

Have you been getting the sense lately, upon reading certain posts, that the Twilight Zone theme is playing in the background?

Judging from the way my "tubes" seem to keep clogging I don't think I'll risk making the trip.

Don't blame you. I attempted a tube trip once. Tripped on a wiki and landed in a pile of Goatse.

I just... haven't been the same since... *shudder*

-Rex Hondo-

Bill Mulligan: "No, I don't hold up Bush's GPA as proof that he is smarter than Kerry."

So what? You just comment out of the blue that Bush is smarter than Kerry, without ANY evidence? Okay, you cite the results of the election. The one that was very, very close. Was it mishandled? Sure. Is that an indication of a lack of intelligence or more particularly, evidence of Bush being MORE intelligence. No. No matter how you spin it, no. In which case, the only thing left on the table is the GPA.

Bill Mulligan: "How Kerry did in college is of no relevance at all, really."

Who is more intelligent is both impossible to accurately discern and equally irrelevant. Yet as far as i can see (and I apologize if I am incorrect) YOU introduced the topic to this particular dialog.

Bill Mulligan: "The fact that Kerry's dwindling band of defenders STILL try to spin his grades as indicative of some level of superiority shows just how deeply the revelation of his sub-Bush achievement cut. Again, it's no big deal...except to those who made it one."

Then why perpetuate the dialog? Why introduce the comparison?

Why introduce the comparison?

i think it was R.J. who first mentioned the GPA thing and then it was Sasha who commented on it. I was, alas, a distant third to chime in.

As far as bringing up intelligence of Bush or the voters, that has been a part of this thread form the get go.

I don't think Kerry is very smart and certainly nowhere near as smart as his supporters thought he was. But you are correct that my opinion, like that of the many here who opine that Bush is an idiot, is an opinion that cannot be backed up with solid facts, no matter how much we may claim otherwise.

I would add one caveat--"smart" and "intelligent" are related terms but not, in my mind anyway, exactly the same. The most intelligent person I know has done some pretty dumb things in their life. I've worked with kids who were of below average intelligence but had a clarity of mind that gave them far more common sense than their peers. The average kid who studies twice as hard as the genius who blows off his studies is probably a lot smarter than our genius (and will probably go further, which is one reason why life is littered with so many talented failures).

Anyway, I'm sorry if I came off too gleeful in all this. Kerry can be a pompous ass but I think he's genuinely upset with how this all fell out. And you have to give credit to anyone who takes the risk of running for president when there's an even chance of failure on a scale that most of us can only imagine. Kicking a guy when he's down is nothing to shoot for.

"Have you been getting the sense lately, upon reading certain posts, that the Twilight Zone theme is playing in the background?"

You're only just getting that sense of background music now? Dude, I've been getting it for about a year or so now. Only I get it with one slight dif. I keep hearing Baby Elephant Walk.

:)

Oh, look. An honest Republican. Pol. I didn't think there were in left in Bush's world.

October 31, 2006 - MSNBC's Hardball

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) speaking about the attacks on Kerry's remarks:
"Well, it's pretty standard fare in political discourse. You misconstrue what somebody said. You isolate a statement, you lend your interpretation to it and then feign moral outrage." When Matthews stated that Kerry "was bashing Bush," Armey responded, "Right," and went on to say, "A fundamental premise of politics is we can make this work if people just never figure it out."

Does anyone have that picture of the Troops holding up a sign that says Halp us John KERY get out of IraK. I can't find the thing.

The notion that Kerry, who served in the armed forces, would be dissing the troops, or that Kerry, who despises Bush and Co., would be dissing the administration.

I don't know about that. He was talking about what happens if you don't do well in school, and as I'm sure we're all aware, Bush did slightly better in school than Kerry, and Kerry's the one who ended up in the military.

Styer, that was mean.

And absolutely frickin' hilarious. Well done.

over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, no reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out. We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American.

We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong.

We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.

We watched the U.S. falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings," with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater or let us say a non-third-world people theater, and so we watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the high for the reoccupation by the North Vietnamese because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 881's and Fire Base 6's and so many others. Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese. Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to dies so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to dies in Vietnam? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly: But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people. But the problem of veterans goes beyond this personal problem, because you think about a poster in this country with a picture of Uncle Sam and the picture says "I want you." And a young man comes out of high school and says, "That is fine. I am going to serve my country." And he goes to Vietnam and he shoots and he kills and he does his job or maybe he doesn't kill, maybe he just goes and he comes back, and when he gets back to this country he finds that he isn't really wanted, because the largest unemployment figure in the country- it varies depending on who you get it from, the VA Administration 15 percent, various other sources 22 percent. But the largest corps of unemployed in this country are veterans of this war, and of those veterans 33 percent of the unemployed are black. That means 1 out of every 10 of the Nation's unemployed is a veteran of Vietnam.

The hospitals across the country won't, or can't meet their demands. It is not a question of not trying. They don't have the appropriations. A man recently died after he had a tracheotomy in California, not because of the operation but because there weren't enough personnel to clean the mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death.

Another young man just died in a New York VA hospital the other day. A friend of mine was lying in a bed two beds away and tried to help him, but he couldn't. He rang a bell and there was nobody there to service that man and so he died of convulsions.

I understand 57 percent of all those entering the VA hospitals talk about suicide. Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care. We are here in Washington also to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country, the question of racism, which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions also, the use of weapons, the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage in the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions, in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is party and parcel of everything.

The Winter Soldier Investigation did not involve, for the most part, genuine testimonies from genuine veterans. The entire project was a hoax formulated by a group called the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Lt. Kerry was an integral member of the group.

If you don't believe those three claims we really can't find intellectual common ground and can't really have this discussion. We can suggest that Sen. Kerry (D-Mass.) would never insult the military or besmirch the American fighting man but the truth is that Lt. Kerry, USN certainly cast the US Armed Forces in a negative light and for many tainted an entire generation of soldiers. Every stereotype or bit of common wisdom regarding Vietnam vets started somewhere. We probably don't agree where.

Is it believable that John Kerry was trying to insult Bush? Yes. Is it believable that he fumbled it? Yes. That pretty much ended the issue for me.

The fact that it goes any farther than that with anyone saddens me. I liked the Daily Show's bit on it tonight. Then Stephen Colbert's bit set my teeth on edge. He showed the clip of Tony Snow saying, "where could you possibly put the word 'us' in that sentence? Maybe, "you wind up us landing in Iraq?" that makes no sense."

That made me have to leave the room. I just couldn't watch anymore. Tony Snow is smart enough to figure out where the word 'us' would go. So he's deliberately pretending to be stupid, and it infuriates me that he can do that *successfully*. Acting like he's too stupid to figure out 4th grade grammar actually does exactly what he wants it to, and I just couldn't watch the TV for awhile after that.

Craig J. Ries, in response to Only masochists or psychopaths actually want to be in Iraq right now:

I'm still trying to decide between those which one my brother is.

If you're saying that right now your brother is in Iraq...and that he's HAPPY there...and doesn't want to go home...then yes, there's something wrong with him, sorry.

If, on the other hand, he is reluctantly staying even though he'd rather be somewhere else because he feels that an abrupt, simultaneous pullout of all U.S. forces would cause things to become even worse than they are, that's something entirely different. But I said anybody who wanted to be in Iraq was either a masochist or psychopath.

If he also thinks that every single thing the U.S. has done over there has been completely justified from day one, then I have to add "delusional" to the list of applicable adjectives.

Mike, in response to Near the beginning of this year, Joel Stein wrote a column in which he stated his belief that saying "I support the troops but I don't support the war" is a copout. I partially agree with him. Me, I do not support the war and I do not support anybody who believes the war is right. If some of the troops believe the war is right even today, then I say fuck them. They aren't deserving of my support, respect or the planet's oxygen. wrote:

Supporting the troops by opposing the war is not a copout. Every soldier takes an oath to place the constitution above his own life, and it isn't done casually. That dedication is being squandered to feed the insurgency. It's simply the conservation of an endangered national resource.

I honestly wonder if they really know what they are getting themselves into when they take that oath. If you "place the constitution above your own life" does that mean that you blindly follow whatever orders you're given and don't consult your conscience?

I support the troops who come back and speak out against the war.

I support the troops who are over there against their will and can't leave because they'd be locked up for going AWOL.

I even support the troops who are willingly over there because they feel that regardless of whether or not it was right to invade in the first place, the only thing standing between complete bloody anarchy in Iraq is the American military presence there. In other words, the ones who feel that they owe it to the Iraqi people to help clean up the mess.

I do NOT support the other kinds of troops. The ones who run places like Abu Ghraib. The ones who think that the past three years have been completely worth it and that the deaths of thousands of civilians somehow serve a greater good. The ones who are willing to do anything, kill anybody, torture anybody, act like savages, in order to make themselves feel safer and to feed their delusion that their brutality somehow honors and protects America. They are a disgrace to their uniforms. There is no honor in their actions.

DaveOConnel: I'm not sure why Kerry thinks its OK for *Iraqis* to terrorize kids and women in the dead of night, but that's a different headache, and one I'm not going to invite upon myself.

If Kerry is a genuinely decent man, he doesn't think it's all right for Iraqis to terrorize other Iraqis.

In late 2002 and early 2003, there was a choice. The U.S. could:

A) Allow Hussein to remain in power, occasionally killing and brutalizing those under his rule, maintaining order through fear and the threat of violence and/or imprisonment

or

B) Remove Hussein by any means necessary. This includes bombing the hell out of Baghdad and many other cities, imprisoning and tormenting people without evidence of guilt, getting rid of the police force that was keeping the oppressed Shiites from going to war with the Sunnis, acting surprised when civil war broke out on top of the already problematic insurgency, etc.

Seems to me that the lesser of the two evils would have been to leave Saddam in power. Removing him by any means necessary makes about as much sense as removing a brain tumor by decapitating the patient.

In the end we have caused far too much damage to make it worthwhile. I find it very hard to believe that the death toll caused by three more years of Saddam (from 2003 to 2006) would be more than the death toll after three years of U.S. occupation.

Back to your original question, Dave. Is it okay for Iraqis to terrorize Iraqis? No. Is it okay for Americans to terrorize Iraqis? No. But I would be more comfortable if it were Saddam's people doing instead of American troops, because that way I would be able to hang onto my belief that Americans were above terrorizing people, that Americans could never be that cruel.

Well, now people have seen what Americans are capable of. It has made people around the world look at America in a new, very negative way. It has even caused some of the people whose country is occupied by American forces to take up arms against them.

Bill Mulligan: "i think it was R.J. who first mentioned the GPA thing and then it was Sasha who commented on it. I was, alas, a distant third to chime in."

True. You did not, and I admit that I was under the impression that you had. My mistake 100%. But I must say, I will forever despise the fact that many people feel comfortable quoting within a debate setting without leaving any indication of who they are quoting. Complicates the process and contributes to misunderstandings, particularly in longer discussions.

Bill Mulligan: " I would add one caveat--"smart" and "intelligent" are related terms but not, in my mind anyway, exactly the same. The most intelligent person I know has done some pretty dumb things in their life. I've worked with kids who were of below average intelligence but had a clarity of mind that gave them far more common sense than their peers. The average kid who studies twice as hard as the genius who blows off his studies is probably a lot smarter than our genius (and will probably go further, which is one reason why life is littered with so many talented failures)."

No argument there.

Bill Mulligan: "Anyway, I'm sorry if I came off too gleeful in all this. Kerry can be a pompous ass but I think he's genuinely upset with how this all fell out. And you have to give credit to anyone who takes the risk of running for president when there's an even chance of failure on a scale that most