Wizblog

"an autopsy of Kerryism"

There's not a lot more that needs to be said after Victor Davis Hanson slices and dices John Kerry:

How could John Kerry, born into privilege, and then marrying and divorcing and marrying out of and back into greater inherited wealth, lecture anyone at a city college about the ingredients for success in America? If he were to give personal advice about making it, it would have to be to marry rich women. Nothing he has accomplished as a senator or candidate reveals either much natural intelligence or singular education. Today, Democrats must be wondering why they have embraced an overrated empty suit, and ostracized a real talent like Joe Lieberman...

...This is not the first, but third, time he has denigrated soldiers in the middle of a war-and there is a systematic theme: John Kerry's assumed superior morality allows him to pass judgment from on high about supposedly lesser folk who become tools of a suspect military: thus we go from limb-loppers and Genghis' hordes to terrorists to dead-beats. The only constant is that the haughtiness is always delivered in the same sanctimonious, self-righteous, and patronizing tone....

...The Democrats should use this occasion to have an autopsy of Kerryism, or this strange new tony liberalism, that has turned noblesse oblige on its head. It used to be that millionaire FDRs and JFKs felt sympathy for those of the lower classes and wished to ensure that the hoi polloi had some shot at the American dream. But today's elite liberals-a Howard Dean, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, George Soros, Ted Turner-love the high life and playact at being leftists simply because they are already insulated from the effects of their own nostrums that always come at someone poorer's expense while providing them some sort of psychological relief from guilt...

Lots more good stuff, so read it all. I don't think this flap will hurt Democrats' electoral prospects significantly, (though it is my fervent hope that it will.) But it really should put an end to John Kerry's national political ambitions. He has already proven that it is not enough to get him to simply shut up, even for a minute.

Tool.

UPDATE 11/1: "Kerry Smart" - A video by Scott Ott of Scrappleface

UPDATE 11/1: An older Boston Globe article, for anyone who hadn't been aware of this, points out that John Kerry's grades at Yale were "lackluster"...lower even than those of the object of his botched joke.

In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.

Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D's in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.

Yeah, but he sure cut a dashing figure in his college photo. I knew I had seen that photo before. It was in the dictionary under "tool".

UPDATE: 11/1: How wrong I was that there was "not much more to be said" about John Kerry. Witness Noemie Emery:

What was especially moving was this emotional note in your statement: "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."

How right you are to realize that attacking a disabled person or one who has suffered a serious illness is the worst thing that can be done by a civilized person, so dire that, of course, you feel free to insult Rush Limbaugh, a radio performer who has carried on uncomplainingly in spite of his deafness, and Tony Snow, who has recently suffered a bout with serious cancer.

Yeah, I know. Shooting fish in a barrel.

UPDATE 11/3: The Hatemongers Quarterly on Kerry. Good stuff.

Posted by dan at November 1, 2006 10:50 AM | TrackBack