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| Home Front: Politix |
| Lame excuses |
| 2006-11-06 |
| By Mark Steyn My face time with John Kerry has been brief but choice. In 2003, I was at a campaign event in New Hampshire chatting with two old coots in plaid. The senator approached and stopped in front of us. The etiquette in primary season is that the candidate defers to the cranky Granite Stater's churlish indifference to status and initiates the conversation: "Hi, I'm John Kerry. Good to see ya. Cold enough for ya? How 'bout them Sox?" Etc. Instead, Mr. Kerry just stood there nose to nose, staring at us with an inscrutable semi-glare on his face. After an eternity, an aide stepped out from behind him and said, "The senator needs you to move." "Well, why couldn't he have said that?" muttered one of the old coots. Why indeed? Right now the Democratic Party needs the senator to move. Preferably to the South Sandwich Islands, until tomorrow evening, or better still, early 2009. He won't, of course. A vain, thin-skinned, condescending blueblood with no sense of his own ridiculousness, Sen. Nuancy Boy is secure in little else except his belief in his indispensability. We've all heard the famous "joke" now: "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. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." (Rimshot). Yet, tempting as it is to enjoy his we-support-our-dumb-troops moment as merely the umpteenth confirmation of the senator's unerring ability to Swift Boat himself, it belongs in a slightly different category of Kerry gaffe than, say, the time they went into Wendy's and Teresa didn't know what chili was. Whatever he may or may not have intended (and "I was making a joke about how stupid Bush is but I'm the only condescending liberal in America too stupid to tell a Bush-is-stupid joke without blowing it" must rank as one of the all-time lame excuses), what he said fits what too many upscale Dems believe: that America's soldiers are only there because they're too poor and too ill-educated to know any better. That's what they mean when they say "we support our troops" -- they support them as victims, as children, as potential welfare recipients, but they don't support them as warriors and they don't support the mission. So their "support" is objectively worthless. The indignant protest that "of course" "we support our troops" isn't support, it's a straddle, and one that emphasizes the Democrats' frivolousness in the post-September 11 world. A serious party would have seen the jihad as a profound foreign policy challenge they needed to address credibly. They could have found a Tony Blair -- a big mushy-leftie pantywaist on health and education and all the other sissy stuff, but a man at ease with the projection of military force in the national interest. But we saw in Connecticut what happens to Democrats who run as Blairites: you get bounced from the ticket. In the 2004 election, instead of coming to terms with it as a national security question, the Democrats looked at the War on Terror merely as a Bush wedge issue they needed to neutralize. And so they signed up with the weirdly incoherent narrative of John Kerry -- a celebrated anti-war activist suddenly "reporting for duty" as a war hero and claiming that, even though the war was a mistake and his comrades were murderers and rapists, his four months in the Mekong rank as the most epic chapter in the annals of the Republic. It's worth contrasting the fawning media admiration for Mr. Kerry's truncated tour of duty with their total lack of interest in Bob Dole's years of service two presidential campaigns earlier. That convention night in Boston was one of the freakiest presentations in contemporary politics: a man being greeted as a combination of Alexander the Great and the Duke of Wellington for a few weeks' service in a war America lost. But Mr. Kerry is the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the Democratic straddle, of the we-oppose-the-war-but-support-our-troops line. That's why anti-war Dems, outspinning themselves, decided they could support a soldier who opposed a war. And as Mr. Kerry demonstrates effortlessly every time he opens his mouth, if you detach the heroism of a war from the morality of it, what's left but braggadocio? Or, as the senator intoned to me back in New Hampshire when I tried to ask what he would actually do about Iraq, Iran or anything else, "Sometimes truly courageous leadership means having the courage not to show any leadership." (I quote from memory.) In fairness to Mr. Kerry, he didn't invent the Democrats' tortured relationship with the military. But ever since Eugene McCarthy ran against Lyndon Johnson and destroyed the most powerful Democrat of the last half-century, the Democratic Party has had a problematic relationship with the projection of power in the national interest. Jimmy Carter confined himself to one screwed-up helicopter mission in Iran; Bill Clinton bombed more countries in a little more than six months than the Zionist neocon warmonger George W. Bush has in six years but, unless you happened to be in that Sudanese aspirin factory, it was as desultory and uncommitted as his sex life and characterized by the same inability to reach (in Ken Starr's word) "completion." As for John Kerry, since he first slandered the American military three decades ago, he's been wrong on every foreign policy question and voted against every significant American weapons system. To be sure, like Mr. Kerry in 2004 deciding that the murderers and rapists were now his brave "band of brothers," the left often discover a sudden enthusiasm for the previous war once a new one's come along. Since Iraq, they've been all in favor of Afghanistan, though back in the fall of 2001 they were convinced it was a quagmire, graveyard of empire, unwinnable, another Vietnam, etc. Oh, and they also discovered a belated enthusiasm for the first President Bush's shrewd conduct of the 1991 Gulf War, though at the time Mr. Kerry and most other Democrats voted against that one, too. In this tedious shell game, no matter how frantically the left shuffles the cups, you never find the one shriveled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support When it Matters. To be sure, the progressives deserve credit for having refined their view of the military: not murderers and rapists, just impoverished suckers too stupid for anything other than soldiering. The left still doesn't understand that it's the soldier who guarantees every other profession -- the defeatist New York Times journalist, the anti-American college professor, the insurgent-video-of-the-day host at CNN, the hollow preening blowhard senator. Mr. Kerry's gaffe isn't about one maladroit Marie Antoinette of the Senate but a glimpse into the mindset of too many Americans. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #13 (Kerry, that is.) |
| Posted by: lotp 2006-11-06 19:15 |
| #12 Especially not in the office of SOME OTHER SENATOR from ANOTHER STATE. frigging jerk. |
| Posted by: lotp 2006-11-06 19:15 |
| #11 After an eternity, an aide stepped out from behind him and said, "The senator needs you to move." "Well, why couldn't he have said that?" muttered one of the old coots. Why indeed? Me, my father, my grandfather, my great grandfather, and any of our long line of friends and family would have stood up and told the Senator "Fucking make us, dumbshit." with blood in our eyes. You don't try this kinda' shit with people raised on farms and factories and if you want to get us riled up, just try to lord it over us with some high-faluutin' condescending easterner bullshit. I'm well-educated, but I wouldn;t have put up with this for one second. |
| Posted by: FOTSGreg 2006-11-06 19:13 |
| #10 "The Senator needs you to move" Then I guess the Senator's shit out of luck, ain't he? |
| Posted by: mojo 2006-11-06 14:30 |
| #9 LOL tu3031, that one rings true eh!! what a piece of work..John f'n Kerry. |
| Posted by: RD 2006-11-06 14:14 |
| #8 i forgot.. and thank you ryuge! »:-) |
| Posted by: RD 2006-11-06 14:11 |
| #7 Heard another JFnK story on the radio here the other day. A few years back a cop pulls over a guy who turns out to be wanted on something outstanding and while the cop's in the process of arresting the guy, a Mercedes pulls up, the driver leans out and tells the cop to move the crusier so he can have the parking spot. JFnK. I don't doubt that it happened for a second. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2006-11-06 14:09 |
| #6 national treasure, again thank you Mark! The Straddlers: The left still doesn't understand that it's the soldier who guarantees every other profession -- the defeatist New York Times journalist, the anti-American college professor, the insurgent-video-of-the-day host at CNN, the hollow preening blowhard senator. Mr. Kerry's gaffe isn't about one maladroit Marie Antoinette of the Senate but a glimpse into the mindset of too many Americans. |
| Posted by: RD 2006-11-06 14:08 |
| #5 "The Senator needs you to move" Jeebus, what a nose-in-the-air fruitcake. Can't even ask those lower than him to move, himself. Has to have his "staff" do it for him. What an arrogant pr!ck. |
| Posted by: BA 2006-11-06 13:35 |
| #4 "Sometimes truly courageous leadership means having the courage not to show any leadership." Pure gold YJCMTSU! |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2006-11-06 10:27 |
| #3 Bill Clinton bombed more countries in a little more than six months than the Zionist neocon warmonger George W. Bush has in six years but, unless you happened to be in that Sudanese aspirin factory, it was as desultory and uncommitted as his sex life and characterized by the same inability to reach (in Ken Starr's word) "completion." Ouch! |
| Posted by: Mike 2006-11-06 08:27 |
| #2 That's it then; the dems, a party of union hangers-on, unemployed blacks, mafia contract kick back operations, and ambulance chaser lawyers are too good for soldiers and sailers. Too pure, too superior, too educated, and especially, too nuanced. You just wouldn't understand. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2006-11-06 08:13 |
| #1 A vain, thin-skinned, condescending blueblood with no sense of his own ridiculousness, heh, heh. |
| Posted by: anon 2006-11-06 05:54 |