October Surprise!

Just in under the wire, Senator John Kerry explains what he means by "support the troops."



And his explanation and non-apology provides the last bit of information necessary for a firm diagnosis of acute Bush Derangement Syndrome:

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. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

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. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.

The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it. These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor.

Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men. And this time it won’t work because we’re going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. 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.

I don't think Kerry meant to insult the troops. I think we have another example of a rich liberal Democrat who's so divorced from the universe in which the rest of us live that he has no idea what he sounds like to real people.

I'm with Jonah Goldberg:

My own hunch — echoed by many readers — is that Kerry's just a Vietnam-era fossil who thinks the old nostrums about the draft and the underprivileged still apply. That's the language he's comfortable with. That's the tradition he comes from. And that's the sort of rhetoric that comes naturally to him. He's hardly alone in perpetuating the Vietnam paradigm, but he seems uniquely gifted at sounding like a moron when he does. A lot of Kerry supporters never really understood why a "war hero" didn't win more support from military folks. The simple fact was that most military folks saw him as part of the anti-war tradition. And his service notwithstanding, that's the only reason anybody ever heard of him. So when he tried to claim credit for fighting in a war he called a war-crime, most military types saw through it as rank opportunism.

I don't think Kerry meant to insult America's military (which doesn't mean he didn't insult them). What he doesn't realize is that his reflexive Vietnam era talking points get him into trouble because — this just in — this isn't the Vietnam era. The more you think about it, the more Kerry represents almost everything wrong with the Democratic Party.

So remember. When you vote next week, you have a real choice. You can either pick the President's party -- warts and all -- or you can pick the party of the morons who decided that John Kerry should be the President of the United States.