Fisking John F’ing Kerry

Like many Americans, I find John Kerry’s remarks presumably aimed at our soldiers fighting in Iraq disgusting. In case you have not heard or seen Kerry’s comments, here they are:

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

With the aid of the MSM, Kerry has since made public what he claims to be his intended comments:

“Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.”

Whichever way he intended to deliver this ‘joke,’ both are idiotic and neither are funny.

Now the good senator from Massachusetts, rather than apologizing, wants to blame anyone who ‘misconstrued’ his remarks as being an insult towards the troops as people who want to ‘smear’ or ‘swift boat’ him. His comments (found on his own website) he used to defend his remarks are ripe for a fisking.

“If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy.”

Crazy? Senator, your explanation might be believable if this was the first time you and your friends in the Democrat Party made disparaging remarks about our troops. During the Winter Soldier investigations, you accused your fellow veterans of committing war crimes. When you ran for congress in 1972, you said: "I am convinced a volunteer army would be an army of the poor and the black and the brown." [pdf] (h/t Journal-Advocate). More recently, you charged that our troops in Iraq were terrorizing Iraqi families ‘in the dark of night’. Your friend Dick Durbin compared our troops at Gitmo to Nazis (among other things). Your sycophants in the media such as Bill Maher, Richard Belzer, and on Air America have also made comments similar to how I interpreted yours that people who join the military are either poor or uneducated or both. If your comments were truly misunderstood, you only have yourself to blame.

“This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.”

Give me a break senator. Do you really expect that when you make a profoundly stupid statement that your political opponents are going to let it go? You and your cronies on the left jump on every gaffe the president or everyone else who opposes you makes. This is politics. Politics are not for the faint of heart. This is part of the culture that you have helped cultivate. If you don’t want to be criticized, join the Red Cross. And as to your chicken hawk argument? I refuse to dignify it with an answer because it is not worthy of a serious response. As this photo indicates, some of our soldiers in Iraq also misinterpreted your comments. Maybe its because they joined the military instead of studied hard.

“I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.”

Republican hacks who have never worn the uniform? How about the person you wanted to be your running mate in 2004, John McCain? Beyond that, the fact that you once wore the uniform does not give you carte blanche to make irresponsible statements about our soldiers without being called on it by others who did not wear the uniform. And about this ‘lying about Iraq’ business. Do you include yourself among Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Wesley Clark, and others those who ‘lied’ about the presence of WMD in Iraq leading up to the war? Refresh my memory senator but did you not vote in favor of going into Iraq?

“The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it.”

Bravo Senator Kerry! You managed to somehow tie Hurricane Katrina into your argument. I am very impressed! Once again senator, if President Bush mislead us into Iraq, so did you and much of the international intelligence community. Its very shameful how you accept no responsibility for any of your own actions. As to the policy that is killing and maiming our soldiers? This is an unfortunate fact of war, whether the policy is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or if it’s a popular war or not.

“Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men. And this time it won’t work because we’re going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.”

Okay senator, I understand that the Republicans have a ‘failing’ strategy in Iraq but riddle me this: what is YOUR strategy for VICTORY? I have yet to hear one from you or any prominent members of your party. Its perfectly fine to criticize Bush’s strategy in the war on Islamofascism, I have my own problems with it. But you should try to be part of the solution rather than the problem. Much of the blame for the problems in Iraq should properly be laid at your feet and others who have done nothing but undermine the mission. If you have a better idea, speak up (Hint: saying that you will fight the war ‘tougher and smarter’ will not cut it).

I see that you have made yet another attempt at an apology on your website. You should thank the media and us bloggers for helping you get your message out. Otherwise, your apology would go unnoticed (is it really that difficult to call a press conference and verbally issue your apology?) This is probably the most we can expect out of you. You still don’t get it do you Senator Kerry? You can’t even make an apology without blaming others for their ‘misinterpretations.’ We are all just too stupid to understand what you really meant. Maybe you should bone up on your communication skills so that you can more effectively communicate with us ‘common people.’

***UPDATE***

When I published this post yesterday, I purposely decided not to respond to one of Kerry’s attacks concerning body armor for the troops because I was not sure of the facts. Now that I have done some digging, I have found Kerry’s charges about the G.O.P. run government not providing body armor for the troops to be false.

Here is the part of Kerry’s response I originally left out of this post:

“These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor.”

In light of this charge, I decided to do a search on the non-partisan Factcheck.org. This nugget of information I would like to share:

This is a nasty tactic – accusing an opponent of playing with the lives of American troops – and both sides have stooped to it. This line of attack actually began with Republicans in 2004, when President Bush's campaign repeatedly accused his Democratic opponent John Kerry of voting against body armor.

We de-bunked Bush's claim at the time, but now there is even less excuse to make such an accusation because later investigations have made it clear that the initial shortage of up-to-date body armor was not the result of any vote in Congress, but instead was a classic supply-chain foul-up. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office laid the shortage to the inability of manufacturers to meet the Pentagon's sudden increase in demand, and logistical mistakes by the Pentagon in getting the gear shipped to Iraq and distributed.

There is a lot of other good information in the article (including a complete timeline beginning in 1941) that you should read so that you are prepared the next time politician X accuses politician Y of not providing body armor for the troops.