"You know," we now all know Senator John Kerry deadpanned in Pasadena, "education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don't" — punchline! — "you get stuck in Iraq." The political armwrestling is over whether Kerry was talking about a) the one-and-a-half million Americans who attend college through the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and tour, or who decide to enlist when out of school, with or without diplomas; or b) just one American, President Bush. A literal reading lends itself to the first interpretation. According to Kerry's prepared remarks delivered publicly yesterday, the senator was guilty only of a "botched joke." Word was passed that the script was supposed to be read "you end up" instead of "you"; "getting us" instead of "get"; and "stuck in a war in Iraq" instead of just "stuck in Iraq."
Kerry is a careful man because he is maladroit, and the senator's animus for the president alone is enough to accept his explanation. Nearly all tucked in — but for a couple of corners sticking out. Kerry's conference came after a press release that was perfervid and rambling; there was nothing about a joke in it, though there was a little line about writer, commentator and current White House Press Secretary Tony Snow being a "stuffed shirt." Also, the senator and some of his colleagues stand by Kerry's prerogative to declare the president uneducated and owing strategic failure to ignorance. Take that assumption — soldiers have no investment in their mission, just shipped off to wherever — with John Kerry's disheveled friends from three decades ago parodying the sempiternal Joe Rosenthal photograph, immortalized on the cover of Kerry's own book, and one can spot disdain. But Kerry was talking about Bush!
Well, now, go and tell the man standing over you that he should not have bruised your jaw, since you said his sister, not he, is ugly. Where soldiers themselves seem justified to take personal offense is their deliberate and maintained association with the Iraqi campaign, and a prevailing military reverence for George Bush; all of which was, by Kerry, affronted.