The Kerry Flap

May qb just say this?

No fan of John Kerry am I, but all of this public consternation and
bellowing is just opportunistic, wilful misconstruing.  There isn't a
person alive (forgive the hyperbole here) who doesn't know that, deep
in his heart of hearts, John Kerry was trying to make sport of
President Bush, not the troops.  The references to Kerry's 1972
testimony - you remember, don't you?  The "black, the brown and the
poor" - are just more of the same.  There was an important question to
be raised about the relative merits of volunteer vs. compulsory
military service, and one of them was the nature of the interaction of
the financial incentives to volunteering and the fiscal demographics of
the young people who would be invited to volunteer.  We need to keep
those debates warm.

We're better off as a country discussing the merits of his point in the
context in which he made it instead of taking what is an obvious,
rhetorical blunder - which of us has never made such a blunder in
public speaking? - and using it to score petty political points.

Kerry thinks Bush is an ignorant boob.  He is wrong in that assessment.
But that is no justification for the kind of posturing that's going
on.  If the elephants maintain control of both houses, qb will be glad
and deeply relieved, but it will have been a Pyrrhic victory because of
the way it came about.

qb