Bad Jokes? No, Bad Honesty

There's much ado about something, namely, what John Kerry just said. John Kerry remarked yesterday that if the youth of today neglected their education, they would wind up stuck in Iraq. Immediately the Republican war machine launched a horrific and devastating attack against Kerry and did precisely what they aimed for. They slaughtered Mr. Kerry's political future.

I'm not going to debate the Republican moral standing that these attacks were based on, Kerry did a fine job of that himself:

"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. 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."

What I am here to say and to make a point of is that, badly stated or not, Kerry was spot on. To understand why, you need to understand America, both then and now.

When John Kerry served America during Vietnam (as did John McCain, to whom I say "For shame, dirtbag, for attacking your fellow soldier on political grounds!"), the draft was alive and well, and the draft meant precisely what he said. If you were lax in school, you could easily find yourself in the mud of Vietnam.

In the America John Kerry serves today as a Senator, there is now a sort of 'back door' draft for today's Vietnam, Iraq. In poorer (and generally, uneducated) regions of America, the US military has launched a guerilla war to gain recruits for Iraq. The only viable way of escaping this is to get out of that, get smart, get an education, and make something of yourself (maybe even a Senator down the road).

John Kerry said nothing about soldiers in the military being stupid, or for that matter, uneducated. Some are. But then again, so are some Americans. And Frenchmen. And British. And Iraqis. That's not the point, though. What happened is that John Kerry misstated his point, and the Republican war machine let out a fatal barrage of misquotations, intentional wrongful paraphrasing, and demands for an apology for something he had no need to apologize for.

For shame, Republican scum.