New vs. Used

Stewart Kissel wrote:
Well be prepared two years from now for the return
of you know who Somewhere in Texas a village is
looking for him.

Wow! Stuart can read bumper stickers. He must relly bee smart. Hees
gong too halp Jon Cary ged them stoopid army pepple oud of Irak and
intoo a reel kollege like the ons Kerry god into or Gore flunked out
of.

November 5, 2006
Kerryism
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Kerry surely must be one of the saddest Democratic liabilities around.
Some afterthoughts about his latest gaffe, which is one of those rare
glimpses into an entire troubled ideology:

(1) 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.

(2) How could Kerry possibly claim that he was thinking of the
uneducated in the context of George Bush, who, after all, went to
Harvard and Yale?

(3) Some of the brightest and most educated Americans are not only in
the military, but veterans of Iraq. Two of the best educated minds I
have met - Col. Bill Hix and Lt. Col. Chris Gibson, both Hoover
Security Fellows - were both Iraqi veterans. What is striking about
visiting Iraq is the wealth of talent there, from privates to generals.
Without being gratuitously cruel, the problem of mediocrity is not in
the ranks of the military, but on our university campuses, where
half-educated professors and non-serious students killing time are
ubiquitous. Personally, I'd wager the intelligence of a Marine Corps
private any day over the average D.C. journalist. Every naval officer
I met at the USNA, without exception, seemed brighter than John Kerry,
whose "brilliance", after all, has managed to offend millions of voters
on the eve of a pivotal election. If the Democrats lose, it will be
almost painful to watch the recriminations against Kerry fly.

(4) 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.

(5) The mea culpa that Democrats are blaming the war and not the
warriors is laughable after Sens. Durbin, Kennedy, and Kerry have
collectively compared American soldiers to Nazis, Pol Pot's killers,
Stalinists, terrorists, and Baathists.

(6) The problem is that Kerry is not just a senator, but the most
recent presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, and thus in some
sense, especially given the diminution of Howard Dean, the megaphone of
the entire party.

(7) His pathetic clarification, as he blamed everyone from Tony Snow to
Rush Limbaugh, displayed the same Al Gore derangement syndrome, and
thus raises a larger question: what is it about George Bush that seems
to reduce once sober and experienced liberal pros to infantile ranting?

(8) And why is the supposedly lame Bush so careful in speech, and the
self-acclaimed geniuses like a Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, or Howard Dean
serially spouting ever more stupidities? For all the Democrats'
criticism of George Bush, I can't think of a modern President who has
so infrequently put his foot in his public mouth, and, by the same
token, can't think of any opposition that on the eve of elections seems
to have an almost pathological death wish.

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. Poor Harry Truman must be turning over
in his grave - from bourbon, cigars, and poker to wind-surfing and
L.L. Bean costume-of-the-day says it all.

©2006 Victor Davis Hanson