Oh yeah, that’s a good one!
I think the real reason that this thing has made it to 12 pages is that this is all they’ve got. I mean, if you’re a conservative here, what else are you going to talk about? Our military submitting to the whims of the Iraqi Prime Minister? The Bush administration making plans for a nuclear device available on the internet? The election polls? The integrity of evangelists?
Faux outrage over John Kerry is all they’ve got, and some don’t mind jumping hip deep into it.
Gosh, guys, I’m really sorry I haven’t kept up with this crucial, vitally important issue. You know how it is, news cycles and all, so much going on, so much time spent rolling around on the floor, pointing at the TV and laughing myself half to death! Haven’t even had time for our local liberal “Dis the Heroes!” rally. Gloating is so unseemly, I may have to set aside a couple of days next week for repentance and remorse…
I’m jumping in here without reading all the posts just to include my 2cents worth.
When I heard Kerrys comment I thought wow john, you are talking about the attitude back in the 60s. Then I got to thinking about how he,if he is elected president, would get us out of this idiotic war.
Might be he would feel it necessary to reinstitute the draft. Then the comment as he stated it would be factual.
I also heard whats his name Snow giving Kerry a hard time trying to figure how the word ( us ), which is what we were told Kerry left out of the sentence, fits in his sentence. Well it fits nicely
“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.”
If you don’t, you get (us) stuck in Iraq
Anyway there are the first thoughts of this 60 year old .
Well, duh. 
I think the last time the GOP had anything more substantive than “make up sh*t about the opposition” for an election, I was still in puberty.
As others have briefly mentioned previously, note the lack of outrage over John Boehner blaming US Generals in Iraq for botching the war. Compare and contrast…
From viewing all the political ads on t.v. lately, I’d say making up shit about your opposition is certainly not unique to Republicans.
John Boehner (R-Oh) is my representative. My lack of outrage means only that I have come to expect this sort of thing from him. He won’t be getting my vote again this year, for what that’s worth. Unfortunately, I live in a Republican stronghold and he has zero chance of losing. I find that as disheartening as the jokers who believe that make blanket statements about one political party as if Ted Kennedy = John Kerry= Nancy Pelosi=John Lieberman. If you can’t be bothered to educate yourself beyond the “R” or “D” then, please, do us all a favor and stay home.
Oh, and as far as Kerry goes. That was an incredibly ill-advised comment to make. In fact, when I first saw the clip, I assumed that someone had dubbed his voice because I never thought he’d say something so politically suicidal.
I think the joke he made was intended to be a joke, and was not in fact a mistake, I think it was a little raw, perhaps tasteless, but the context was completely different. I don’t take any more umbrage at his joke than I would at any President that ever spoke at the Correspondents’ Dinner.
Frankly, I don’t think you’ll find what you claim to be able to. Not saying you definately wont, but the Dems and Pubbies attack in different ways, making apples to apples comparisons difficult. The Dems are, with the notable exception of Al Gore, slicker, more dynamic, and a touch hipper than the stodgy, staid uptight Pubs, meaning that they don’t try to slide in smart-assed quips as often. Frankly, the ability to sling a witty quip or barb isn’t in the wheelhouse of either Bush OR Kerry.
About the “Bring 'em on” comment. I think there was not a damn thing wrong with it. Bush is a schmuck, without the personal experience and history to back that kind of arrogance up, but I’m just fine with an American President showing some defiance in the face of danger. Yes, the expense of that defiance is the lives of the men and women that serve in our armed forces, but keep in mind, this is the way the world was made, and the way the world will be long after all of us are gone. Besides that, we should never forget we’re a volunteer force. Those in the military decide to go.
The troops, of which this guy is the Commander in Chief, needs to have a “come get some” attitude, with a little “screw you, we’re America” tossed in for good measure. Jingoistic? Yes, a bit, but also the way we got as far as we did.
We’re there. We shouldn’t be, but we are. Why not plant your feet, look those against us square in the face, and say just what he did. I’m sure he regrets it, but he shouldn’t. America was built on, and thrives because of our courage, our fortitude, and to some degree, our cowboy mentality.
I started a joke
that started the whole world crying
Oh, if I’d only seen
that the joke was on me
Everyone back away quietly from this thread, or I’ll quote the Bee Gees again. Or maybe move down to Manilow. 
Except it makes no sense. In the first sentence he says that if you do well in school you will do well in life, right? But if the second sentence was supposed to refer to Bush, he’s saying that Bush did not do well. Now while a GPA of 77 at Yale is nothing to brag about, the Yale degree in itself is quite prestigious. A Harvard MBA on top of that make Bush quite well educated. And he’s done pretty well (yes, it large part to the Bush name). He did make it to The White House. On top of that, whay would Kerry point to Bush in an academic sense. His GPA at Yale was a similarly unstallar 76, even lower than Bush’s. Do you really think he’d want to call attention to that?
Have you looked at the joke in the context of the entire speech instead of the two sentences?
I don’t understand how people are making this interpretation. Implying that people who drop out of school join the Army does not imply that everyone in the Army dropped out of school.
My interpretation is this: “If you don’t do well in school, you’ll have to join the military. And the military is not a good place to be these days because of the mess that Bush got us into.”
True enough, but the real fact is that the comment was about Bush and not about the troops, which is blatantly obvious if you read the comment in the context of the entire speech.
Quite the point, Gang. The speech considered as an entirety is pretty much nothing but a old fashioned Bush-bashing. Good clean fun, nothing wrong with that. Of course the last four lines “don’t make sense”, they’re excised, they’re out of any context.
And belabor: none of us saw this in a vacuum, it was served to us by our various and sundry media outlets. And how was it served? “Kerry Gaffe?”? “Kerry Slurs Our Heroes!”? The idea that Kerry was dissing the troops does not arise from the text, but from an interpretation on the text by others. Our variouis partisan glands were stroked before we formed our objective, unbiased opinions. If you are told what you’re going to see before you see it, and you like what you’ve been told you’re going to see, you’re going to see it!
On a slightly different tack: suppose, in the midst of a jolly bit of Dubya ragging, I were to say “Bush is stuck in Iraq”. Would you dither in confusion, what, oh what, is 'luc trying to say? “Bush isn’t “stuck in Iraq”, Bush is in Washington, D.C.!” Unless I serverely overestimate your cognitive capacities, I very much doubt it. You would immediately know what “Bush is stuck in Iraq” means. But not in this case. In this case “Bush is stuck in Iraq” means “Our soldiers are all dumfuks”.
Balderdash, sir! Tommyrot!
Coding clean up on aisle 5!
Oh, come on. No one has claimed that “Bush is stuck in Iraq” couldn’t, in context, mean—unambiguously—that the President has gotten himself (and us) into a “quagmire” of sorts. But that’s not we have here. Here we have a Bush riff, than a segue stating that topic is now switching to education, and words like “education” and “homework” used after that. Then we have the little matter of the phrase you offer here not even being included in the speech.
Yes. See my previous post to Luci to see how I parse it.
You mean words like “troops” or “soldiers”? Also do not appear. Also entirely absent.
One thing I don’t quite get- what’s it matter?
I mean, here we have Kerry, the guy who actually made the speech, saying, “I didn’t mean to dis the troops. It was a joke about Bush.” Shouldn’t that have cleared it up?
Instead, we’re still debating over what he really intended to say. This is the guy who actually said it, telling us what he meant to say, and we’re still arguing over it. At what point does this become non-news? At what point does it become clear that it’s only still in the news because it makes the Dems look bad?
If someone insults me- and then later makes it clear that they never intended to insult me- then for me, it doesn’t matter. No harm, no foul. Why keep making a big deal out of it? If he seriously meant to insult the troops, then he’d keep doing so- he wouldn’t try to rectify the situation. And don’t tell me it’s another example of him “flip-flopping”- if he never meant to dis the troops, then he’s not flip-flopping by clarifying his speech, he’s merely setting the record straight.
Sure, Kerry screwed up. But he’s not running for anything! He’s not speaking for anyone other than himself! Why is it still such a huge effin’ deal?
The only reason I can imagine that there are people who keep bringing it up is in an attempt to distract the average voter from other issues.
Interesting that you focused on the cherry on top and ignored the rest of the post.
Give that man a cigar.
Just pointing that out. Again. The inference that you claim is inescapable is simply that: an inference. You cannot support the inference by direct reference to the text, all you have for substantiation is your insistence that it is so.
And as far as ignoring that which is inconvenient…I note that you are uninterested in my suggestion that the context was delivered to you, as it was to me. I suggest that said context has a bearing on how the segment was heard, even such paragons of objectivity and sound judgement as you and I.