excperpt:
Hitchens kicks Kerry in today’s Wall St Journal. The kicks are hard (it’s Hitchens) but given we’re dealing with thirty-five years of condescension, slander, and insult, I’d have liked to see two or three more paragraphs of Hitch using a steel-toe. Kerry’s “stuck in Iraq” insult is uniquely trans-generational. It immediately connects with his 1971 “Winter Soldier” slanders where he asserted American troops were committing war crimes through out Vietnam, crimes on par with those of “Jing-gis Khan.” The anti-Vietnam War movement shaped Kerry politically and that decayed fossil still propels him– an ancient addiction he and his cohorts can’t shake. Simultaneously stuck in the past and stuck on stupid, the Junior Senator from Massachusetts has now insulted three generations of American troops.
Hitchens wonders if the US military is the new third rail of American politics. Interesting thought, but I think not. (Social Security still rates as the third rail, though as Boomers age perhaps its amps and volts are diminishing.) Here’s the real deal: Service men and women simply won’t accept insults about them and their service. In the 1970s they didn’t have the Internet or talk radio to counter-attack the boys and girls in New Mobe and network producers addicted to images of panhamdling, socio-pathic Vietnam vets. The troops now have the technology. This past week individual American citizens in uniform met Kerry’s insults with politically appropriate ripostes. That’s what nailed Kerry –individual ripostes from serving men and women and vets– not Geore W. Bush’s stump speech or Tony Snow’s press conference responses.
John Kerry’s simply not ready for the YouTube world.
Follow his career, such as it is. Kerry’s made it to the lofty perch of Senator from Massachusetts by:
(1) planning a political career from the age of 15 (if not age 11)
(2) riding the coattails of the Kennedy political machine (ie, brown-nosing and carrying water for the clan)
(3) marrying rich women
This nifty route to power works for a mediocre, arrogant politico in a world where the friendly political machine and a friendly media mask his foibles, incompetencies, and inadequacies.
The friendly machine and media also blunt criticism. The arrogant mediocrity (backed by clan and family cash) can float along within a machine and media bubble, slowly rising from preening young poseur to Beltway Clerk to Senator.
The Internet and talk radio have burst that bubble. The bubble is a puddle of slippery soap. I suspect Kerry now knows it. His Tuesday (October 31) press conference was a dismal failure. He essentially pounded his chest like an eighth grade boy and shouted “I’m a man.” That conference was designed to focus his (Kerry’s) media enablers on the White House, and spin the story as a “Kerry versus Bush” conundrum rather than Kerry responding to the people he’d slandered. The New York Times bought that meme, but the Internet didn’t. Troops responded with the now classic “Jon Cary halp” photo, which Drudge slapped on his page. Kerry then went into “seclusion” — as safe a place as any for a “man” insistently destroying himself. But seclusion sounds so un-manly, doesn’t it? (Seclusion– that’s where Victorian ladies retreat after their latest affair becomes London’s topic du jour.)
Sure, the DNC probably ordered Kerry off the hustings. Seclusion keeps him off YouTube.
The NYDCLA Axis (nid-claw media axis, New York-Washington-Los Angeles) can no longer hide Kerry’s mediocrity from the voting public. George W. Bush is clearly a better politician than Kerry. Bush was also a better student than Kerry. In other words, the “MainStreamMedia” story line that “Bush is stupid” is really a political lie. Is Bush stupid compared to Al Gore? (Gore invented the Internet!!!) Stupid compared to John Kerry? Obviously not...
Much more follows.
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