He was probably just speaking from his own experience. After all, he didn’t study that much, had lousy grades in school, and ended up in a hot-fire zone in Vietnam. He just figured that’s the way it was for everyone.

He was probably just speaking from his own experience. After all, he didn’t study that much, had lousy grades in school, and ended up in a hot-fire zone in Vietnam. He just figured that’s the way it was for everyone.

He was probably just speaking from his own experience. After all, he didn’t study that much, had lousy grades in school, and ended up in a hot-fire zone in Vietnam. He just figured that’s the way it was for everyone.

Though I’m not a conservative, I have to agree with this NRO editorial:

Conservatives have had plenty of cause to complain that

There are probably more loathsome human beings, but it’s hard to imagine one that came as close to becoming president as Senator John Kerry.

And you know, this insulting-the-troops thing has to be driving him nuts, because he probably was taking a slam at Bush, but it backfired. A smart politician would apologize, and say that he didn’t intend any insult to the troops themselves, but Kerry’s not a smart politician. I don’t think that going on the offensive (and I mean that in more than one way, with his comment about Tony Snow and Rush Limbaugh) is going to play well with the independent and moderates, regardless of how much it gives orgasms to the net roots. In particular, when he talks about how he’s always supported the troops, it just provides another opportunity for his opponents to remind people of the 1972 Senate testimony, in which he accused them of being war criminals.

And if this story develops legs like a centipede, and extends for another week into the election, and the Dems don’t do as well as they are currently drooling for, guess who will get the blame? Not that he ever had a prayer, but that will be the end of any hope, even on his own part, that he will get the Dem nomination again.

[Update a few minutes later]

Kerry obviously never learned the first lesson of holes (i.e., when in one, stop digging). Now he’s insulted the troops again:

I am a retired US Navy Senior Chief who spent 21 years serving in the nuclear navy. I read Kerry’s statement and took it as an insult. I just heard his press conference and now take offense that he thinks I’m “crazy” because I was insulted by his remarks last night.

As others have said, like Howard Dean, he’s a gift to Republicans that just keeps on giving.

You have to wonder just how powerful Rove’s mind-control beams are to get them to behave this way.

[Update]

For those wondering what this is about, here’s the video on youtube.com. And as one commenter pointed out, if he meant to insult Bush, that’s kind of ironic, considering that the president has a degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard, with better grades than Kerry got.

[Update about 4:37 PM EST]

Bush is going to make a speech shortly that had been previously planned, but he will now take the opportunity to respond to Kerry’s remarks. Time to put on some popcorn.

[Update a little before 6 Eastern]

Austin Bay has further thoughts:

I

Judith Weiss writes about the asymmetry between blue and red:

…to Dems and particularly to Nick Lampson if he loses the race for Tom Delay’s seat to a write-in candidate? The Houston Chronicle says that it could happen. I’m assuming that whoever wins will continue to be a steadfast supporter of pork at JSC, including Orion.

Armed Liberal has an offer for simpletons who think that fascism is descending on America, but things are great elsewhere.

But not quite, thanks to blogs:

..on July 19, 1958, several black teenagers, members of the local NAACP chapter, entered the downtown Dockum Drug Store (then the largest drug store chain in the state) and sat down at the lunch counter. They were ignored. They kept coming back and sitting at the counter, from before lunch through the dinner hour, at least twice a week for the next several weeks. They sat quietly, creating no disturbance, but refusing to leave without being served.

…They asked for help and support from the national NAACP, but the national organization refused to endorse or even acknowledge their actions. The confrontational tactic was against NAACP policy. The national newswires picked it up and the story ran nationwide, but quickly vanished.

On August 11, while the early arrivals were sitting at the counter waiting for their friends to show, a white man around 40 walked in and looked at them for several minutes. Then he looked at the store manager, and said, simply, “Serve them. I’m losing too much money.” He then walked back out. That man was the owner of the Dockum drug store chain.

That day the lawyer for the local NAACP branch called the store’s state offices, and was told by the chain vice-president that “he had instructed all of his managers, clerks, etc., to serve all people without regard to race, creed or color.” State-wide. They had won, completely. Their actions inspired others, and the sit-in movement spread to Oklahoma City. By the middle of 1959, the national NAACP was losing disaffected members for refusing to endorse the scattered but spreading sit-in protests, gave in, and sponsored the Greensboro sit-ins.

Nineteen months before the Greensboro sit-ins that have been credited with being the start of the civil rights sit-in movement, it really began at a downtown drug store in Wichita, Kansas. The Dockum sit-ins were largely ignored by the NAACP in their archives, probably out of embarrassment, and were unknown even to many civil rights historians.

This is the kind of civil rights that everyone can get behind. No laws were needed to get the chain to do the right thing. The market did it, as a result of the demand of its customers. Jim Crow was evil, but most don’t seem to understand, or remember, that Jim Crow was the government. When the government gets involved, in fact, history indicates (as evidenced by affirmative action, not even to mention much of the twentieth century in Europe, including Russia, and South Africa) that racial discrimination gets more, not less egregious, and that individuals take hindmost. And of course, the NAACP should be ashamed.

You know, I find it bizarre to read about fascism descending on America, when (as always) it always descends on Europe. Well at least of you consider the UK part of Europe, which the people behind these civil rights monstrosities would like to.

We live in a country where young boys – one was just seven – are taken aside and questioned for trying to knock conkers out of chestnut trees on public ground. Where a grandmother whose neighbour accused her of not returning a ball kicked into her garden was arrested, fingerprinted and required to give her DNA. The police went through every room in her house, even her daughter’s drawers, before letting her go without charge or caution.

Where two sisters can be arrested after a peaceful protest about climate change, held in solitary confinement for 36 hours without being allowed to make a phone call, then told not to talk to each other as a condition of their bail. As this paper reported, their money, keys, computers, discs and phones were confiscated, their homes searched.

There is much more, all of it enabled by Blair’s laws and encouraged by a vindictive and erroneous contention that defendants’ rights must be reduced in the pursuit of more and quicker prosecutions. Our prisons are full, problem teenagers are, by default, exiled to a kind of outlawry and every citizen becomes the subject of an almost hysterical need by the authorities to check up on and chivvy them.