The latest Kerry kerfuffle

The thing that strikes me about the latest edition of John Kerry inserting his foot into his mouth is how similar the whole thing is to Trent Lott's performance at Strom Thurmond's birthday party, which ended his Senate leadership career. Both guys made clumsy attempts at humor which went horribly wrong and ended up being extremely offensive and demeaning a significant segment of the population. I would hope that fair-minded people are treating the incidents similarly, either condemning or attacking both. For my part, I think it's silly that Lott had to resign his position or that Kerry has become a focal point of this campaign season, but I understand that politics is a contact sport.

Of course, while I expect fair-minded people to treat them the same, I expect no such thing from the legacy media, especially at this point when they are in full court press mode in campaigning for Democrats (with, as usual, Fox News and a handful of newspapers acting as dissenting voices). So the New York Times outright lying about the actual content of Kerry's quote is about as surprising as Allen Iverson leading the Sixers in shots in their opener.

While I will defend Kerry over the original remark, his followup lie is another matter and there is a valid complaint there. Him trying to play the "I'd never insult the troops!" card rings hollow when his whole career was built on smearing troops in Vietnam with a series of outlandish fabrications in front of Congress. He is certainly a symbol of the longtime Democrat hostility to our military, and using him to highlight that viewpoint is fair game.