I haven’t seen the full context, but according to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Sen. John [tag]Kerry[/tag] (D-Mass.) was delivering a well-received speech to students at Pasadena City College in California on Monday when he slipped up. Kerry was joking with the audience, delivering a lot of one-liners and jabs at Bush, when he said, “You know, education — if you make the most of it, you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in [tag]Iraq[/tag].”
To be sure, Kerry has said smarter things. The way the comments were delivered, it made it sound as if he believed the troops in Iraq are there because they’re not smart and didn’t work hard in school. A Kerry aide admitted that the prepared statement had been “mangled in delivery,” and the senator admitted that it was a “botched [tag]joke[/tag].” Kerry was supposed to say, “I can’t overstress the importance of a great education. 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.”
Given this, Kerry made a mistake. He missed a couple of words — admittedly, important words — in a prepared text and ended up saying something he didn’t mean. It happens. Indeed, if you’re George W. Bush, it happens quite a bit.
Regardless of Kerry’s intentions, the Republicans see an opportunity in the senator’s mistake.
Before the clarification, White House press secretary Tony Snow, House Majority Leader John Boehner and Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, lambasted the four-term senator and demanded he [tag]apologize[/tag]. […]
“This is an absolute [tag]insult[/tag],” Snow said at a daily press briefing. “Senator Kerry not only owes an apology to those who are serving, but also to the families of those who’ve given their lives in this.”
Boehner said the remark was “insulting” and called on “Democrat candidates across the country” to publicly denounce the comment.
To his credit, Kerry didn’t just let these attacks stand. He held a press conference today to say, quite forcefully, that he wouldn’t “stand around and let [the GOP’s attempt to change the subject] work.”
“If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy,” he said. “No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut-and-run policy in Afghanistan and a stand-still-and-lose strategy in Iraq.”
He added, “I’m sick and tired of a bunch of despicable Republicans who will not debate real policy, who won’t take responsibility for their own mistakes, standing up and trying to make other people the butt of those mistakes. I’m sick and tired of a whole bunch of Republican attacks most of which come from people who never wore the uniform and never had the courage to stand up and go to war themselves. Enough is enough. We’re not going to stand for this…. 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. No way. It disgusts me.”
You think Kerry has learned something from the [tag]Swiftboat[/tag] experience?
Watch the whole thing. You’ll be glad you did. If Dems hit back this hard at every GOP smear job, I suspect we’d hear a lot fewer GOP smear jobs.