John F. Kennedy @ MindSay 
Category: News and Politics
I'm glad John Kerry didn't win the Presidential election in 2004.
This is what he said the other day at a campaign rally at Pasadena City College "You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and do your homework, and make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.
What he meant to say was "If you don't, you get us stuck in Iraq" and hence the punch line was not supposed to be against the brave soldier on the front line in Baghdad, but President Bush. I guess on the campaign trail this passes the laugh test but it reeks of being a sore loser.
Even if he had said what he intended to say, it still isn't very funny.
It's patronizing.
This is funny.
John Kerry isn't some first or second term member in the House though, he's the Democratic Party's most recent nominee for President. More important than what he said, or attempted to say, is that he was attempting to use the military, and not the civilian brass in the Pentagon or Secretary Rumsfeld but the everyday Airmen, Soldier, Cadet and Marine as the subject of his joke. For a man whose claim to fame was that he 'served in Vietnam' I would think he would have a little more respect for his fellow comrades in uniform. For someone who wanted you and I to entrust him as Commander-In-Chief, and who still has ambitions to do so, I find his attempted statement even more condescending than his actual gaffe.
And his comment, laid bare for all to hear, is a quintessential example of what is wrong with the Democratic Party. It's become the party of John Kerry, no longer of John Kennedy. A generation ago, the soldiers and privates in our military were by a margin of 2:1 registered Democrats to Republicans. Today, they are more than 2:1 Republican. And not because they support long-standing GOP plans to eliminate the estate tax or reform this country's tort system. It is because Republicans, conservatives, have much less of a problem than do liberals, progressives and what other adjectives those on the political left and in the Democratic party want to call themselves, with the idea of America and being American. It's that simple.
It sounds corny but it's true.
It's the culture war stupid!
Culture wars are not about abortion and guns, gay rights and the environment. They are about the notion that this is a country worth living in and not being embarassed to say so, and therefore it is a country worth sticking up for and defending.
I'm not saying John Kerry is unpatriotic. Or that Democrats are unpatriotic. But it is fair to point out that it is those on the political left who have a much harder time embracing an American national identity and uniting in common cause with their fellow citizen. There are several reasons for this.
One, is that those left-of-center, like John Kerry, think that they are smarter than those right-of-center. That Harvard, or MIT are infinitely more interesting places than say, oh, Texas. That everything in between the Ivy League and Berkeley is flyover country.
Two, those left-of-center have no problem with identity, just an American one. It's why John Kerry and those like him love to count among their supporters any group of Americans that has a hyphenated identity that seperates itself from the rest of us.
Three, John Kerry and many of his followers are baby-boomers and of the Vietnam era, and forged their political identity not so much as being anti-war, but anti-military, skeptical of the use and projection of American power in the world, opposed to defending our national interest. It's why they are always looking for some conspiracy or cabal behind every foreign policy of our government. Usama bin Laden isn't evil, the Carlyle Group or PNAC is. Saddam Hussein isn't the real threat, Halliburton is. And on, and on.
This wasn't the case back in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was the Democratic Party's standard bearer. Just reread the words in his 1961 inaugural address.
"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
If you didn't hear his Boston accent which gives his identity away, you'd swear it came out of the mouth of a Republican. And it would be followed by charges of imperialism, racism, colonialism and every other ism that you learn in sociology and ethnic studies classes in college.
From my favorite Constitutional law professor, and talk radio show host Hugh Hewitt; "Kerry reminded people that the war against the war has been underway since mid-2003, and that the Democrats have never taken the many opportunities to try and rally around the effort to reconstruct a free Iraq but at every turn have demanded an exit on some sort of rushed and arbitrary timetable. They disparaged the effort to push elections forward, then the effort to form a government, and now that government's effort to rule and unite. The enemy has been watching, and has calculated that they only way they can win is by waiting out America ---just as the North Vietnamese did."
Kerry has since issued an apology. Always a day late and a dollar short, he can't even be sincere in saying he's sorry. Like his Iraq votes, he was for what he said, before he was against it.
The troops aren't buying it though, and neither should you. Remember who understands that we are whether we like it or not a country at war. And that you don't fight wars unless you intend to win. John Kerry and too many Democrats don't want us to win. They don't want to win because they never supported getting in the fight in the first place. Not winning in Iraq validates their anti-war position all along. Democrats and John Kerry do not want bad things to happen to this country or our interests, or more directly to you and I one morning on our way to work or in an airplane up in the sky. But they have no plan or strategy to prevent such incidents from happening; be it a suicide bomber on a bus like in Israel or a spectacle of the 9/11 variety.
It's not their patriotism I question.
It's their judgment.
Any vote for any Democrat is a vote against victory and a vote for vulnerability. Vote for victory. Vote Republican.
CHOICES 2006: THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS
Current mood: 
optimistic
Category: News and Politics
This is from the politically astute and classical scholar Victor Davis Hanson (not a bad writer either) from today on the pathological frivolity that defines the political left in this country;
"What sends liberal criticism (of Bush, Republicans and conservatives in general) over the edge into pathological hysteria? . . . The Democrats have not elected congressional majorities in 12 years, and they've occupied the White House in only eight of the last 26 years. The left's current unruliness seems a way of scapegoating others for a more elemental frustration - that they can't gain a national majority based on their core beliefs. More entitlements, higher taxes to pay for them, gay marriage, de facto quotas in affirmative action, open borders, abortion on demand, and radical secularism - these liberal issues don't tend to resonate with most Americans."
Like sports, ultimately what matters in politics is winning, and other than Bill Clinton, the Democrats haven't had much success at all. 1964 and the Kennedy Administration were their high-water mark but that was 40 years ago.
While Democrats may get better marks when it comes to such issues as education, health care, the environment, etc. the not so dirty little secret is that those issues are of secondary importance and little interest when it comes to national elections. And always will be. State and local elections have more sway when it comes to improving schools and providing health insurance coverage. The only issues nationally that matter, Republicans own, and not because they have such a sterling record but because enough voters, like me, have zero confidence that the Democrats can perform when it comes to national and homeland security and maintaining low tax rates that are the foundation of sustaining economic growth and current level of prosperity.
Remember what is at stake in this election and who you want in charge when the egg timer goes off. Any vote for a Democratic candidate is a vote against victory and a vote for vulnerability.
Liberals Gone Wild!