[...] Others blogging or covering story: Cassandra@Villainous Company , Gaius @ Blue Crab Boulevard, Hot Air (with updates as the story unfolds), BlackFive, Riehl World View, Navy Times, Army Times, My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, Urban Grounds , UPDATE: Military service members tell Michelle how they feel about Senator Kerry’s remarks. [...]

[...] I'm a Veteran who left a prestigous private college after my sophomore year to join the US Army to fight in the first Gulf War.After being medically separated for injuries sustained in combat, I earned a BS in Professional Writing. I now write complex documentation sets for real-time tactical command and control systems for network-centric warfighters. I doubt Mr. Kerry has a high-enough security clearance to even read the documents that I write. And even if he did, he'd have no effin-idea what they meant.Maybe if I would have studied harder I wouldn’t have ended up stuck in Iraq back in 1991. Maybe I could have made something more of myself.This veteran, along with the American Legion and the AMVETS think Mr. Jane Kerry owes us an apology. ——————– Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity. [...]

I heard his explanation that he forgot the word “us” in his “joke” which explained his supposed reference to Bush. So, now he’s accusing Bush of not doing his homework in school? Give me a break, that had nothing to do with Bush. It had everything to do with the college audience he was speaking to and the Viet Nam war when the college boys got a deferment and the rest of the dummies were shipped across the world to give their lives for our country. The big friggin jerk!!!!!

This may not affect the mid-term elections, but Kerry has finished off any chance he may have had for his own 08 Presidential bid.

[...] Urbangrounds writes, “nothing more than a poorly-delivered joke.” [...]

He is a complete waste of space… the only presidential position he’s competent to serve is the Dixie Chick’s Fan Club.

He tried to take a cheap shot at Bush and it backfired. Instead of doing the smart and right thing and just apologize, he went on the attack and made the 2006 election the 2004 election all over again. I guess he forgot the outcome on 2004. No wonder the dem canidates are distancing themselves from him. He’s another one of these guys who’s ego is so big it sucks the air out of any room.

I think the republicans are clutching at straws, there is real anger about the direction of the USA at many levels, not only the war, but also inequality.

Soldiers are mostly from poor families, especially in the USA. Why is that? Why aren’t rich kids going off to war? What kind of democracy allows this to happen?

The fact that the poor are usually not very educated (some are stupid some are normal but none have made the most of their talents by working low paid jobs) reflects the fact that most higher education in the US is very expensive and private. Poor people are mostly excluded from it. The big change now is that unlike the past if you don’t have a college degree you are unlikely to get a good job, and blue collar jobs are going to China Mexico and India, making the rich people that own the companies exporting those jobs richer (shareholders are included in this).

Increasingly middle income americans are affected too, mostly through their children. Sometimes as there are no good jobs to go to to live like a human being, people are forced to go to the army as it offers training and the only viable career…
Some become criminals… some become cleaners etc..

Whereas C students like Bush succeed based on their parents money not their own efforts, so this is hardly meritocracy. I wouldn’t call Bush a smart man. I think he has outsourced the thinking to other unelected people which is a problem in a democracy.

As we live in a world were the rich can avoid the army, saying that poor people are the ones fighting the war is not a lie… Just think about it…

Both Bush and Cheney avoided going to Vietnam by Bush getting his rich family to intervene for him to guard the fearsome invaders in Texas (i.e. nobody), always at the ready from the bar, armed with several bottles of alcohol. Whereas Cheney used his university study as a reason not to go to Vietnam.

If they had fought in a war i would have much more time in listening to Bush or Cheney talk about the necessity of war, the reality is neither has experienced it… and they talk far too much about it.

I think the republicans are clutching at straws, there is real anger about the direction of the USA at many levels, not only the war, but also inequality.

The first point is obvious: John Kerry isn’t running for office, why is he in the news at all? If it wasn’t so clearly a misspoken attack on George Bush, the statement would be damning but the Republican pile-on is simply a BS diversion from a discussion about who took us into this war and how we can get out of it.

About your second point, though, I think it’s more complicated than you depict: the demographics of the military are different from the nation as a whole but they aren’t the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.

Well let’s let a conservative say it. John Derbyshire from the Corner:
John Kerry is awful, and anything we can do further to degrade his political prospects is worth doing. But really, I saw a clip of him making the much-deplored remark, and it was obvious that the dimwit in Iraq that he referred to was George W. Bush, not the American soldier. It was a dumb joke badly delivered, but his meaning was plain. My pleasure in watching JK squirm is just as great as any other conservative’s, but something is owed to honesty. There’s a lot of fake outrage going round here.

I can assure you that my outrage is anything but fake.

Lots and lots of false outrage. It was a botched joke, you know it, I know it, and so do the voters who will be tossing the Republican congress out on its ear in a week.

This really is one of the most pathetic attempts to create an uproar over nothing that I’ve ever seen. And it’s funny to watch a bunch of non-serving wankers (not including you, of course) who used educational deferments, try to act like they are outraged! Comedy gold.

Another conservative puts it this way:

While the media is obsessed parsing the ad libs of someone on no ballot this fall, something truly ominous has just happened in Iraq. The commander-in-chief has abandoned an American soldier to the tender mercies of a Shiite militia. Yes, there are nuances here, and the NYT fleshes out the story today. But the essential fact is clear. In a showdown for control of Baghdad, the Iraqi prime minister took orders from Moqtada al-Sadr, and instructed the U.S. military to withdraw from Sadr City. The American forces were trying both to stabilize the city but also to find a missing American serviceman. He is still missing…

The U.S. military does not have a tradition of abandoning its own soldiers to foreign militias, or of taking orders from foreign governments. No commander-in-chief who actually walks the walk, rather than swaggering the swagger, would acquiesce to such a thing.

Dan-
Luckily ABC’s political director of news, Mark Halperin, believes that his network has a lot to do in the next week to win over conservatives.

They’re off to a good start!

Preston — first Andrew Sullivan is not a Conservative. He’s vile. He’s pathetic. He’s an idiotic asshole. But he’s no conservative.

Second — < edited while I look for the link>