Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Re: Kerry's Statement   [Jonah Goldberg]

Well, I'm sure the Kos crowd thinks that's nifty. What a fighting Dem! Still, it'd be nice if Kerry simply explained what he meant.

My own hunch — echoed by many readers — is that Kerry's just a Vietnam-era fossil who thinks the old nostrums about the draft and the underprivileged still apply. That's the language he's comfortable with. That's the tradition he comes from.  And that's the sort of rhetoric that comes naturally to him. He's hardly alone in perpetuating the Vietnam paradigm, but he seems uniquely gifted at souning like a moron when he does. A lot of Kerry supporters never really understood why a "war hero" didn't win more support from military folks. The simple fact was that most military folks saw him as part of the anti-war tradition. And his service notwithstanding, that's the only reason anybody ever heard of him. So when he tried to claim credit for fighting in a war he called a war-crime, most military types saw through it as rank opportunism. 

I don't think Kerry meant to insult America's military (which doesn't mean he didn't insult them). What he doesn't realize is that his reflexive Vietnam era talking points get him into trouble because — this just in — this isn't the Vietnam era. The more you think about it, the more Kerry represents almost everything wrong with the Democratic Party.  

10/31 12:37 PMShare