Is he sure he didn’t mean it?
When I first heard John Kerry’s “stuck in Iraq” quip I took it as a condescending slam of enlisted men. I’ve heard liberalish friends and acquaintances of mine make similar statements too many times to out of hand dismiss it as a mangled joke. There are organized efforts to persuade young men not to join the Armed Forces, and many universities and high schools ban or frivolously restrict military recruiters on their campuses. When a lawyer recently announced that his client, a medical doctor whose schooling was paid for by the Army, won’t treat soldiers it caused no uproar or even public criticism. Strangely, many of these anti-soldiering folks also like to label political opponents who haven’t served in the military as chicken-hawks. Apparently, to them, military service is an experience so valuable that nobody should have it.
In short, it didn’t strike me as particularly strange that the Senator, who repudiated his own soldiering decades ago, would have made fun of American troops.
He now says he didn’t mean it, that he was actually trying to make fun of President George W. Bush. Yes, of course, if you’re trying to exhort students to become academically accomplished you should mock a guy with degrees from two Ivy League schools.
