Wed 1 Nov 2006
Financial Times reports Edward Luce and Caroline Daniel in Washington write that the Republican Party on Tuesday gained a late burst of energy in its flagging midterm election campaign following remarks by John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, in which he said college students could “get stuck in Iraq†if they do not study hard.
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While campaigning in California, the Massachusetts senator told a college crowd on Monday: “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.â€
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You can read the rest of the story at this link:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/60ee865a-692f-11db-b4c2-0000779e2340.html
November 1st, 2006 at 6:00 pm
Well, that was quite a biased story! If you read some of the more balanced news reports, you’ll find that Kerry was supposed to say, “I can’t overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq.” But politicians LOVE distorting other peoples’ words, and so we have this manufactured news story that the GOP hopes will make the difference for them in several key races. It’s shameful that anyone takes this nonsense seriously. (And it’s also a shame that Kerry hasn’t yet figured out that the best thing he can do for Democrats is to disappear for the next ten years!)
November 1st, 2006 at 6:55 pm
Yes, he was “supposed” to say something different but he didn’t. Instead he insulted a lot of good people in the military!
-Dave
November 1st, 2006 at 8:37 pm
The GOP is confusing an unintentional slip of delivery with an intentional statement of belief. John Kerry does not believe that stupid people make up the military and are therefore gullibly sent to Iraq. He believes that *President Bush* is intellectually lazy and has therefore actively gotten us stuck in Iraq. No matter how much GOP hard heads push this nonesense, people with common sense know perfectly well that Kerry – a former veteran – does not believe that military personnel are uneducated, because he would be saying that HE was uneducated by doing so!
This doesn’t mean that John Kerry isn’t the number two liability for Democrats (Hillary Clinton being #1), and that the GOP is the only political party to use slips-of-the tongue as dogma (see Senator Allen’s “Macaca” statement for an example of a recent Democratic campaign to make a mountain out of a molehill), but in this case, the GOP is 100% wrong misconstruing Kerry’s inability to remember the words of his joke as an actual statement of belief.
And anyway, one could argue that the “us” is contextually inferred in the sentence “If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq” (i.e., you get US stuck in Iraq.)
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:15 am
I don’t think Kerry was wrong at all. Without a college education, options for employment are limited. Many end up joining the military and becoming IED fodder in Bush’s misadventure in Babylon.