Steyn on the Kerry Kerfuffle
Supporting Our Troops [Mark Steyn]
For once, I think Steyn is off base. I do think that he thinks that the troops are idiots and they're uneducated lumpenproles but I don't that that's what he meant. He is dumb enough to say that. He's said it before. He testified before Congress to that effect. He further said that an all volunteer Army would be black and brown and poor. He's accused the troops of war crimes in Vietnam and of "terrorizing" Iraqis during cordon and search operations.
If he's to be damned, fine, let him be damned for what he's actually said. Not for some stupid phrasing. (There is a great deal of irony in the fact that Kerry was impugning Bush's intelligence and wasn't smart enough to make himself understood clearly.
I find the Derb/Jay line, agreeing that Senator Kerry was making a joke about Bush, highly implausible. If you talk to Democrats of the middle-class and upper-middle-class and (in John Heinz Kerry’s case) the neo-Gulf-emir-class, you’ll have heard the same thing a thousand times: these poor fellows in Iraq, they’re only there because they’re too poverty-stricken and ill-educated so they couldn’t become Senators and New York Times reporters and tenured Queer Studies professors like normal Americans do. That is, in fact, what they mean by the claim that they “support our troops”: they want to bring them home and retrain them so they’re not forced into taking jobs as Bush’s torturers and thugs. It’s part of the same condescension as describing soldiers as “our children”. If a 22-year old intern wants to drop to the Oval Office broadloom, she’s a grown woman exercising her freedom of choice. But, if a 28-year old guy wants to serve in Iraq, he’s a poor wee misguided Grade Six drop-out who doesn’t know any better. John Kerry’s soundbite is interesting not because it’s the umpteenth self-inflicted wound by Mister Nuance but because it gets right to the heart of the Democrats’ “support” for the troops.
Posted at 5:00 PM
For once, I think Steyn is off base. I do think that he thinks that the troops are idiots and they're uneducated lumpenproles but I don't that that's what he meant. He is dumb enough to say that. He's said it before. He testified before Congress to that effect. He further said that an all volunteer Army would be black and brown and poor. He's accused the troops of war crimes in Vietnam and of "terrorizing" Iraqis during cordon and search operations.
If he's to be damned, fine, let him be damned for what he's actually said. Not for some stupid phrasing. (There is a great deal of irony in the fact that Kerry was impugning Bush's intelligence and wasn't smart enough to make himself understood clearly.
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