The comments of Senator John Kerry(D-MA):

" 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. "

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The transcript of Kerry's speech as it was supposed to be delivered:

A Kerry spokeswoman, Amy Brundage, said Kerry's prepared text had called for him to say:

"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. Just ask President Bush."

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The Bush Response:

"The senator's suggestion that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting and it is shameful," Bush said at a campaign rally in Georgia where the crowd booed at Kerry's quote.

"The members of the United States military are plenty smart and they are plenty brave and the senator from Massachusetts owes them an apology," Bush said

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Let me first say that if anything were ever meant for the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time-Players, this would have to be it, because it's guffaw at its best, at its most critical and least redeeming. It's drama, drama at a time when we probably need it most, maybe not even realizing that we do, just as we failed to realize it in 1965 or 1966 or 1967 or 1968, even 1969, failed to realize it until Congress, in 1973, ended the " National Emergency " that had become Vietnam.

That is not to suggest that John Kerry might be wrong tactically or strategically, simply because he read a speech incorrectly. The war is not even legal, Saddam was not harboring weapons of mass destruction, it was declared by a President who was elected by the same Supreme Court that in 1983 decided to effectively veto Congress's termination of a national emergency that had become that same Vietnam. As if.

" As if ? "

" As if Vietnam had not been wrong ? "

" That's right. "

" But Iraq is not Vietnam. "

" Then how come the President claims that if we leave, the terrorists have won ? "

" What does that have to do with Vietnam ? "

" We left Vietnam and then the north bombed the south. "

" But the Iranians are not the North Vietnamese and Maliki wants us out. "


" Precisely Watson. So how come we're still there ? "

Maybe that's what Kerry wants to find out.



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Search Blogs For Editorial On Senator Kerry's remarks :

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Response to Jonah Goldberg's article in the National Review:


Dear Jonah:

You're way off base. Senator Kerry was right. College is expensive and kids invariably join the military to qualify for the G.I. Bill and save money, not because they support a war, or Bush. Kerry was not suggesting that our troops are uneducated because they support Bush, but that they join the military because they wish to get an education, but which does not necessarily mean that they should have to be subjected to a unncessarily prolonged war in the process.

The war was predicated on a tenuous, illegal basis which the media has apparently forgotten. Either Bush or the U.N. is lying about WOMDs, which is why there may have been such a movement to diminish Sect'y Gen. Annan with the Oil for Food Scandal.

That's The Bush Cabal at its best: Smear thine enemies; support terrorists like bin Laden in the 80s, so long as they're fighting for you in Afghanistan or Beirut, deny it or have the Pentagon send a memo out to not discuss the matter ( Meg Greenfield, circa 1983 ) lest Osama attack again ( he's very sensitive, you know, he listens to Whitney Houston ), and then claim that Saddam had WOMDs and that we're actually fighting Osama in Iraq.

Uhmmm....

Take care. ( Listen to some Greenday, J......lighten up....Bush is not yet wiretapping you )...

Charles