What I Meant To Say Was, "Three Soldiers Walk Into a Bar..."

Poor John Kerry, a victim only of bad jokesmanship.

"If you make the most of it and you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't you get stuck in Iraq," Kerry said.

Kerry says he was talking about the president, but that he botched the joke.

If you make the most of it and you rehearse hard and you do your talking points and you make an effort to be funny, you can do well.  If you don't, you get shooed back to Washington.

It's been such a lovely couple years, not having to listen to Lurch droning on about this or that, or watching him snowboard or windsurf or do other man-of-the-people-who-marry-into-billions stuff.  But this return to the land of Kerry gaffes might be worth the visual and auditory indignity of experiencing more of this man.  The former and perhaps again-to-be Presidential contender who by the way served in Vietnam has just - in a moment of un-thought-through candor - jabbed America's servicemen and -women in the eye.  He can backpeddle and misdirect all he wants, but there's simply no mistaking his message in this bout of unvarnished jackassery.

“They’ve taken those words — just like they take words all the time — and they distort them on purpose in order to distract Americans from their policy,” he said.

Pardon me, but where's the distortion?  John Kerry thinks soldiers are stupid and/or lazy (not to mention reminiscent of Jenjis Kahn).  I can't fathom any different interpretation or any alternate message that would've shone through if he hadn't "botched" the line.

The botch here was the decision to plant this human gaffe machine out on the campaign trail.  It was so destined to backfire, it smacks of Rovian overtones.

Hot Air points out this study on the debilitating effects of Kerryism.

This is not the first, but third, time he has denigrated soldiers in the middle of a war-and there is a systematic theme: John Kerry's assumed superior morality allows him to pass judgment from on high about supposedly lesser folk who become tools of a suspect military: thus we go from limb-loppers and Genghis' hordes to terrorists to dead-beats. The only constant is that the haughtiness is always delivered in the same sanctimonious, self-righteous, and patronizing tone.

The RNC is calling on Kerry to apologize in a new video, something he's thus far refused to do.

Update: Not only are our troops intelligent, they've got a sense of humor.  Via Drudge: