RW lies about Kerry and "left wing" apologies for what they see as Kerry's "misstatement about our troops" continues unabated. We must hammer on these assholes until it stops.
Even if you hate Kerry, you can't allow this bullying to continue. It empowers the media to lie about anyone to the left of Kerry, and that means you.
Uwe (mumble), a Princeton economics and foreign policy expert, denounced Kerry's remarks in a Post op-ed Saturday
but went on to say in an insightful commentary that unfortunately,
Kerry was right. But Uwe is WRONG. His is the right answer to the wrong person.
"Kerry" was NOT "right" about this issue because that is not what Kerry MEANT.
Just as with the swift-boat attacks and the baseless allegations that Kerry could've contested the 2004 election with the info he had available to him,
We were wrong about the intelligence of some of our allies in the media and amongst anti-Kerry pols.
People do NOT know that Kerry meant Bush and we are NOT doing enough to defend Kerry unless we take time (after the election, which won't hinge on this issue anyway) to defend him.
Folks on DU said this was a dead issue because "well meaning intelligent people" know what Kerry meant.
Uwe, and David Corn, and other Dems, who still think Kerry meant the troops, have proven us wrong.
Here is the e-mail I sent to RealClearPolitics. Someone else needs to e-mail Uwe at Princeton.
(see Uwe's op-ed above.)
-----
To: RealClearPolitics
Subject: Your Distortion of Kerry Joke is Either "Breathtakingly Arrogant" or Misinformed
It seems Repubs have found a new way to tar people with "he insulted the troops" thereby replacing the old "soft on Communism" libel.
Any misstatement or remark can now be construed as proof of "anti-troops" attitude, and the media will knowingly buy into it and say "he can't seem to shake the label, that's showbiz!"
Since the first rule of debate is to be charitable, I will assume that
RCP understands the meaning of Kerry's joke, and how he flubbed it by
dropping a pronoun, since he has been giving the joke for two years now,
as have Jay Leno (who got it from Kerry).
I will assume that RCP does not get its information solely from CNN, but
in fact relies on primary sources, such as the transcript of campaign
speeches and the accounts of people familar with Kerry's stump speech
such as Bill O'Reilly and McCain himself.
I have yet to see RCP or any other left- or right-wing blogger or media
talker (including David Corn and Saletan of Slate, recently featured on
TV alternately trashing and wrongheadedly "defending" Kerry's remarks)
to --retract-- your allegations about Kerry's campaign joke.
Kerry has been using this joke in his stump speech for over 2 years now.
Jay Leno borrowed the joke from Kerry and has -also- been using it for
over 2 years whenever the subject comes up regarding Bush and education.
The joke is about Bush and education, and has nothing to do with
military service, neither Bush's or anyone else's. Since the troops are
not even referenced in the joke or in the rest of the statement, you
can't even pretend that Kerry was insinuating anything by comparing
Bush's education levels to that of the troops. Any such comparison would
be unfavorable to Bush and insulting to the troops, which is why Kerry
did not mention Bush's military service.
Kerry's media transcript was provided to the media that day clearly
states what Kerry was attempting -- a joke about Bush being uneducated
and getting us into Iraq.
(Which he, like many Americans, probably confused with Iran for much of
his adult life. A recent study by a nonpartisan think tank found that
most congressmen cannot tell apart Shia from Sunni, can't tell you which
ones are Iranian and which ones are Iraqi, and CNN in December 1990
declared that "war with Iran is imminent" after Saddam invaded Kuwait.)
Being highly educated bloggers I am sure that RCP was never counted
among the ranks of the educated but misinformed. I'll even bet you
studied the history of that region in high school, or at least read a
book on the subject in college, like most educated Americans. Our
troops, of course are the only Americans who have any incentive to learn
up on the subject, which is why they know more about it than you or I
who might not know what the word "Hajji" means, which Sadr Sadr City was
named for and who built it, or why Sammara is now a ghost town.
Being educated and interested in the subject, you know more about these
things than Bush or most of his allies in Congress, surprisingly enough.
NO reference to the troops is made in Kerry's joke. No reference to
Bush serving in the GUARD because he is uneducated, either.
(after all, that would be stupid: Bush is highly educated -- grades
notwithstanding -- and got out of serious duty BECAUSE of his education
and background, like many people in his income level. That is
thankfully no longer possible today, and as a result, our troops are
probably BETTER educated than their friends and relatives, being in the
armed services and all.)
In fact, the joke (which Leno has been using to great laughs for two
years with no complaints from bloggers) has nothing to do with military
service whatsoever.
Leno once botched the same joke in the same way Kerry did, dropping the
pronoun, "us" which messes up the meaning of the joke.
making it sound as if the troops, not Bush were the subject of the joke.
But to imply that this is intentional on the part of Leno, or Kerry, is
the most asinine form of sophistry on your part.
To imply that Kerry meant something different than Leno when he botched
the same joke in the same way (a joke that Leno borrowed FROM Kerry) is
a double standard. It's no better than idiots who rely on Bush stumbling over his words as their primary source of ire, and ignore the deeper issues.
Here is the joke - as Kerry & Leno have given it for the last two years:
"Kids, education is important. Stay in school or you could end up as
President of the United States (and get us into a failed war in Iraq.")Note the dropped pronoun "US".
That is the only mistake Kerry made, as becomes quite clear from the
context (as you so helpfully put on your website.) I myself was unable
to make head or tail of Kerry's meaning (listening to Ed Schultz, I
asked why Schultz was defending Kerry's comments) until I looked back on
the campaign trail and discovered references to the original joke.
Then it became quite clear what Kerry meant (and I am hardly a big Kerry
supporter) and when I found out that the media "on the ground" had heard
this stump speech a million times and knew that it was a flubbed
reference to Bush, in a speech that had nothing to do with troops one
way or the other, I was livid. The media an uninformed bloggers, who
had forgotten their own commenting on Kerry's joke when he first started
using it in '04, were flexing their muscles once again in an effort to
sway the election, to benefit their favorite moneymakers: George Bush
and Hillary Clinton.
This joke got Leno into big trouble once, with his audience, who thought
he was referring to the troops and not Bush -- for about 5 seconds.
Leno, being smart, did not apologize to you, RCP, or to Hillary, or to
the troops (who are better educated than the population at large and
know what Kerry meant.) or assume his TV audience was as stupid as the
studio booers. Instead, he said, in that famous Leno voice "Oh,
SHADDUP! You know what I meant. It sounded better in rehearsal."
If however you feel it was intentional, I urge you to call on Jay Leno
to apologize.
His democratic "opponents" (Hillary? her husband made great hay
attacking a rapper once) did not.
Otherwise, I anticipate a retraction on your blog.
Feel free to do so after the election.
As Derek McGinty said at the end of the aforementioned TV talk show
where he and Saletan pronounced Kerry dead
(after declaring that the incident proved Kerry's unworthiness as a
person) in response to a letter, McGinty said:
"Yes, we in the media all know what Kerry actually meant.
But the TV audience does not. Is that our fault?
for not telling people the context? Maybe. But that's politics."On the other hand, Bill O'Reilly was quite familiar with the context
of the joke (Kerry, after all, invented it in '04) and came to Kerry's
defense.
I rest my case.
By the way, I am not writing this because of the election because I know
it makes no difference to the outcome. I am writing this because of the
deeply disturbing sophistry it reveals in the attempts by media and
bloggers to shape the perceptions of Americans who are quite
well-educated but sadly uninformed, as I was about the context of this
joke which sophists like McCain and media talkers have twisted knowingly
to their own advantage.
The rules of civil discourse we inherited from Aristotle and Socrates
were created for a reason: to prevent dishonest dialogue, such as that
practiced by the Sophists, which had real and deadly consequences in
matters of state.
One of those rules is to be charitable to your opponent:
interpret his remarks in the most favorable light he can reasonably be
assumed to have made them, and rebut accordingly.
Have the "new media" thrown the rules of journalistic discourse (which
descend from Socrates and the Enlightenment) out the window when they
embraced moral relativism and their detached postmodern ideology?
Or were they, as Adlai Stephenson was famously MIS-quoted in a similar
swift-boat attack, "just too damn dumb to understand" Kerry's remark?
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