A certain Senator:

“If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy.”

That same Senator:

[T]here is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the–of–the historical customs, religious customs.

The Senator once again:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command….

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

Who again is the one who is crazy? That certain Senator, or perhaps some portion of 59,028,111 Americans, or us for thinking that a certain “veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq”?

UPDATE

Jonah Goldberg’s thoughts are perhaps relevant:

Kerry insists he was making a joke about President Bush, not a joke about students who aren’t smart enough to do better than the military. While there’s virtually nothing in the text or video of his remarks to lend support for this, save for a wan smile he offered to the mute audience, it’s possible that was his intent. After all, Kerry is an awful politician, a human toothache with the charisma of a 19th-century Oxford Latin tutor. One can’t rule out the possibility that he simply botched a joke.

If it was a joke, it was a pretty bad one, even for him. First, Bush got better grades than Kerry at Yale. More relevant, if launching the Iraq war is a sign of stupidity and a failure to do one’s homework, Kerry should avoid calling attention to the fact that he voted to approve it and defended that vote throughout his 2004 presidential campaign.

But whether or not it was a joke, it certainly sounded like Kerry was talking about the troops, because that’s the way Kerry talks about everything. Kerry’s a bit like one of those cavemen from the Geico commercials, only he’s a throwback to a slightly more recent era: Vietnam. All of his ideas were formed from his experience as an anti-Vietnam crusader. He may have run as a born-again war hero in 2004, but his political career was founded on his activism against a war he repeatedly labeled a crime. That’s why few gave Kerry the benefit of the doubt.

And why it doesn’t matter that the Senator who said yesterday “I apologize to no one” says today that he is “sorry.”

UPDATE II

John Kerry has apologized to those he called “crazy” yesterday:

“I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform and I personally apologize to any service member, family member or American who was offended”

UPDATE III

AP on John Kerry’s 1972 views:

In 1972, as he ran for the House, he was less apologetic in his comments about the merits of a volunteer army. He declared in the questionnaire that he opposed the draft but considered a volunteer army “a greater anathema.” “I am convinced a volunteer army would be an army of the poor and the black and the brown,” Kerry wrote. “We must not repeat the travesty of the inequities present during Vietnam. I also fear having a professional army that views the perpetuation of war crimes as simply ‘doing its job.’

Special bonus: Sy Hersh agrees on the volunteer army: “There has never been an American army as violent and murderous as the one in Iraq”.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, War, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.