John Kerry, who is widely recognized as being a singularly unfunny kind of guy, tried to make a joke yesterday.  An article on CNN.com quotes Kerry as saying:

You know, education — if you make the most of it, you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well.  If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

I’d like to take the man at his word—believe that his comment was aimed at President Bush and not, as many outraged Republicans are claiming, at patriotic members of the military.

But no matter how I parse the statement, I can’t find anything funny or anything redeeming in it.  There’s no two ways about it: He comes across like an East Coast Ivy League elitist snob badmouthing U.S. soldiers.  (Check out this military blog post I came across last night.  It was posted just a few hours after Kerry made his gaffe.)  Holy smokes.  What a gift for the Republican Party!  And only six days out from the midterm elections.  Certain television pundits (strategists, they mysteriously call themselves) have been keeping their fingers crossed these past few weeks in the hope that their party wouldn’t somehow implode just before the election.  Well, they can uncross their fingers now.  The waiting’s over.  The deed is done.  A leading member of their estimable party—their last presidential candidate, no less—shot himself in the foot before a national television audience last night.  Not surprisingly, some Democratic Party officials are said to be distancing themselves from Senator Kerry.  Distancing themselves, my butt.  They’re running away from the guy like scared rabbits.  One of the last things I heard on CNN last night was that Kerry has been “uninvited” from several campaign events he was previously scheduled to attend.  As I write this post, Fox News is reporting (with the requisite amount of glee) that Kerry has cancelled all his remaining appearances at Democratic campaign functions.

Republican functionaries everywhere are demanding an apology from Kerry.  But Kerry isn’t having any of it…at least not yet.  His immediate response to Republican howls of rage consisted of the following:

I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed-suit White House mouthpiece [Press Secretary Tony Snow] standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh [Al Frankin’s “big, fat idiot”], 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.

Kerry was speaking to a group of students at Pasadena City College in California when he let his lips get ahead of his brain.  As a veteran himself, he certainly ought to know that if there’s anything sacred to rank and file Americans, it’s their sons and daughters who wear the uniform.  The words he used in his mangled attempt at a joke clearly lead the listener to the conclusion that Kerry thinks military men and women are something less than educated.  Retired General Wesley Clark appeared on Fox News this morning and openly admitted that Kerry probably didn’t mean to say what he said.  He went on, however, to say that Kerry’s poor choice of words left him wide open for criticism.

In this election, when both parties are fighting tooth and nail for control of both the House and the Senate, any ammunition either side can get their hands on will be used to the fullest.  And this is one piece of ammo that the Republicans will be using right up until the last ballot of the election is cast.

Just about everyone in the Democratic Party is wishing that Kerry had just stayed home and kept his mouth shut.  And I bet that for the next six nights, Democratic candidates everywhere will be tossing and turning in their beds, having nightmares about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Technorati Tags: John Kerry, President Bush, Republican Party, midterm elections, Democratic Party, CNN, Tony Snow, Pasadena City College, Wesley Clark

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