The Political Death Of A Salesman

Editor's note: Patum Peperium believes most fervently our troops are the best America has to offer.

Most politicians, particularily the good ones like Barney Franks, Gerry Stubbs, Chuck Schumer, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid... are usually one or two steps lower than a used car salesman. Yesterday, while speaking to a group of college students, a very used up, used car salesman, Senator John Kerry gave up the ghost of his political career:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

In that one statement, Mr. Kerry not only gave us a window into his highly-educated and prejudiced mind, he also gave us a window into his recklessness and absence of moral authority. If he believes the United States Military is full of stupid slobs, then he had no right, when running for President, to vote for the war in Iraq. Kerry needed to abstain and state why he was abstaining. Instead he voted for it, and, then, as he enjoys saying, voted against it by not giving his support for the money needed to wage the war he supported. However, with Kerry's first vote, according to his statement yesterday, he sent thousands of stupid men and women to their unnatural deaths. That is eerily similiar to the time when Gov. Bill Clinton, to prove to the country he was tough on crime and therefore worthy of being Commander-in-Chief, iced the mentally retarded death row prisoner convicted of murder, Ricky Ray Rector; "Rector was actually so brain-damaged that he asked the guards to save his pecan pie for when he got back from the electric chair." Both Clinton and Kerry abused their power.

Of course, the truth is our military is the most intelligent, most honorable and highly-educated fighting force in the world.

Semper Fidelis dead man. Don't expect the Marines to carry your rotten corpse back to Louisburg Square. The burial in Arlington is off too.

UPDATE: This statement by Kerry is now being spun as a poor attempt at humour. But is it? From Kerry's 1971 Winter Soldier Testimony:

We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.

FEELINGS OF MEN COMING BACK FROM VIETNAM

I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned With a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.
As a veteran and one who feels this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country.

In 1970 at West Point, Vice President Agnew said "some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse," and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam.

But for us ,as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from Which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion. Hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country, because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared' to, because so many of us who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam, because so many of those best men have returned as quadraplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we cannot consider ourselves America's best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.

In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

We are probably much more angry than that and I don't want to go into the foreign policy aspects because I am outclassed here. I know that all of you talk about every possible alternative of getting out of Vietnam. We understand that. We know you have considered the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and I am not going to try to dwell on that, but I want to relate to you the feeling that many of the men who have returned to this country express because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism...

UPDATE II: John Kerry has issued a press release. The blame for his breaktaking statement lays with many people, among them my Valentine (for the newer readers, I am officially Rush Limbaugh's Valentine, as decreed by him on his program until February 13, 2007) :

Washington – Senator John Kerry issued the following statement in response to White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, assorted right wing nut-jobs, and right wing talk show hosts desperately distorting Kerry’s comments about President Bush to divert attention from their disastrous record:

“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. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.

The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it. These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor.

Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men. And this time it won’t work because we’re going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.”

It would be wise for the Democratic power brokers to expect a bit of a backlash. Don't be surprised if in the next 48 hours Bill Clinton says something outlandish to try and shift the momentum...

UPDATE III: YouTube has the video.
Mrs. P

Comments

[Old Dominion Tory]

I do so wish the good Senator would come down to my alma mater, look at some of the officers in the ROTC detachments as well as some of the cadets who plan on commissioning in the Army and Marines and tell them that they're in the military because they are stupid.
This is typical Boston-area upper-middle-class drivel. Why, darling, would any one want to enlist in the Army? Dear me! It is well outside of the socially acceptable professions! Mummy's and Daddy's little status symbol is just too good for that sort of thing. Let the rednecks do that! They like fighting!
They should be more like John Kerry--Ivy League, moneyed, clueless, subversive, utterly unfit to carry a Marine PFC's seabag through Logan Airport.

[Mrs. Peperium]

Kerry has married women twice for their money so that he can use their money to further his political aspirations. He's never been enough of a man to go out and make his own money. He approached the military the way he approached marriage; a vehicle to further his political aspirations. He found out he didn't have what it takes to be a soldier, or in other words, a man, He also found out war is horrible. He's a despicable loser. If he did not have his current wife's money to make him look good or reside in the mind-numbed state of Massachusetts, where being an ass in office is so de rigueur that the highly-educated citizenry consistently return murderers, madames of prostitution ring -Franks- or men who plied young and underage Congressional pages with vodka and cranberry juice and then seduced them, to Washington then Kerry would have been found out a long time ago..