Kerryman Joke

John Kerry has apologised for remarks he made to an audience of college students on Monday. The Senator and former Presidential candidate said: "you know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, 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." An off-hand remark and mildly offensive to some US military personnel, but spectacularly ill-advised for somebody who knows first-hand how the weasels in the GOP and their media henchmen attacked his own admirable war record, and largely succeeded.

Telling a bunch of college students that they are better off than US military - or 'ordinary Joes' as the hogwash of US populist discourse likes to call them - is manna from heaven to Karl Rove. It is he and not the Pentagon that will make hay out of this gaffe. Yet I have little sympathy for Kerry, especially as he used the speech to lambast the White House's decision to go to war, a decision that Kerry himself supported in a Senate vote back in January 2003. It sounds like opportunism to me and Senator Kerry had best not bring out the WMD bogeyman. Only the truly venal and crazed of mind bought that one. Those of us that hoped Kerry would succeed in preventing Dubya from seizing a second term did so with fingers crossed, and we would do the same again.