What we can learn from John Kerry's latest flub.
BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Saturday, November 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Regrettable though it might be for the United States military to become an untouchable "third rail" in American politics, there can be little sympathy for someone who keeps on brushing against that rail just to see what will happen. One could have assumed that Sen. John Kerry, who has reason enough to wake up whimpering and biting his knuckles when he reflects on past embarrassments, had learned this lesson. He's almost spoiled for choice in the matter--from the cringe-making "reporting for duty" to the sickly discovery that he had been part of a "band of brothers" rather than a bunch of killers, to the phantom "Christmas in Cambodia."
Yet of all the days that he might want to have back and do over again, last week's clumsy appearance in Pasadena must be the most whimper-inducing of all.
The senator's labored defense of himself is so lame that it has to be true. He had intended (pause for thigh-slapping and guffawing) to make a truly original joke about the IQ and educational level of the chief executive. His crack team of gag-writers had toiled on the joke and combed all the bugs out of it. It was there, poised on the pad and ready for launch. And it fizzled. (Funny--that punchline usually activates the easy-laugh track, as Messrs. Leno, Stewart, Maher and Colbert demonstrate with airy ease practically every night of the week.) And out of the syntactic chaos came the impression that Mr. Kerry thought only a dumb jerk could end up in uniform in Iraq.
No wonder Mr. Kerry feels hard done-by: He can't recount a joke that practically tells itself and has been road-tested to work with almost Pavlovian certainty, especially on campuses. Surely everybody--any fool, in fact--knows that it's Mr. Bush who is supposed to have the difficulties with timing and articulation? Ah, the unfairness of it all. The senator was all in favor of the joke before he actually had to tell it. Haven't we been here before?
Having been the butt of this "stupid guy" humor for so long (the Democrats have been regarding him as almost too dense to breathe since he first ran against their heroine Ann Richards in Texas, and still regard it as a violation of the natural order that he keeps on beating them) the president might be forgiven for enjoying a slight revenge on the fresh prince of Massachusetts. But please, only a slight one.
Occasionally in this campaign, the chief executive and commander in chief has come close to saying that a vote for the opposition is a vote for the other side in the ill-defined "war on terror." This has a Nixonian ring, to me at any rate. The jihadists in Iraq don't usually keep their prisoners for very long but if they did (or if they do in the case of our currently kidnapped Iraqi-American brother who has seemingly been abandoned to his fate in Sadr City) it would be indecent if Republicans started muttering that withdrawal would be a betrayal of our POWs.
For now, the Democratic leadership has ridden (again) to Mr. Bush's rescue by making its own literal-minded condemnation of Mr. Kerry's pratfall. Sen. Clinton and Rep. Ford, and numerous other more exposed and nervous aspirants, are taking their distance from their former standard-bearer. If this is the courage that they show in the face of a minor flub from one of their own . . . but let that go. Is there anything to be learned, or gained, from this essentially frivolous side-issue? I think that possibly there may be.
On Wednesday evening, on Hugh Hewitt's high-octane radio show, I accepted his challenge and gave out my private email. I had said that my emails from soldiers in Iraq were generally relaxed about the Kerry flap: He wanted me to hear different.
I have since had the chance to read about 500 or 600 messages. Almost all of them politely phrased (I exempt one from "the Riordan family" who evidently have not forgiven the long history of British depredation in Ireland) and almost all of them appending the list of college degrees as well as of medals and citations held, these letters show a very deep and interesting rift in which Mr. Kerry plays only a secondary part. Many of my respondents agreed that his words may not have meant or intended quite what they first seemed to mean, but they also felt that the klutziness was Freudian, so to speak, in that the senator's patrician contempt for grunts and dogfaces was bound to come out sooner or later.
One thing I already knew is confirmed--there is a very great deal of class resentment in these United States. Another thing I wasn't so sure of is also confirmed--James Webb in Virginia is right to stress the huge rage felt by those of Scots-Irish provenance who feel that they have born the heat and burden of the day in America's wars, and been rewarded with disdain.
Even my most relaxed soldier-correspondent from Iraq itself (a highly educated friend of faultlessly Irish extraction) confessed to a feeling of irritation at the few chances he had to meet Ivy League types in uniform. There is a sense in which everybody has an uneasy share in the guilty truth of this: Even "antiwar" types sometimes taunt me--an ink-stained scribe of some 57 summers--for not volunteering to carry a pack and rifle myself. Our armed forces do not want a draft, and we are rightly and gratefully stunned by the quality of our volunteers, but is this the best we can do, when we are fighting for our lives and for civilization?
I propose a compromise. Sen. Kerry and his party should publicly demand that the U.S. military be allowed to recruit openly on elite campuses. And the supposed reason for the ban on ROTC--the continuing refusal of the armed services to admit known homosexuals--should be dispelled at a stroke by a presidential order rescinding the Clintonian nonsense of "don't ask/don't tell." It is already outrageous that the CIA, for example, has been firing Arabic and Persian translators because of their supposed private sexual lives. That policy certainly could have come from bin Laden himself.
This is going to be a long war, and not just in Iraq, and we have learned something this week about the perceived inequality with which it is shared and experienced. It would be good if a sideshow spat in a rather mediocre election season could have the effect of making two self-evident wrongs into a right.
Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America" (HarperCollins, 2006).
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