Is That Legal?

I'd say the latter had more respect for the troops, but I'd think it completely irrelevant that one had served in Vietnam and the other hadn't.

Any Martian would choose the former. Anybody who's ever watched a Bugs Bunny cartoon knows that Martians are Republicans. (Unlimited right to bear arms, from hand lasers to planet busters. Would like nothing better than to kill the very last wildlife on whatever orb they're sitting on at the time. Hyper-aggressive and warlike but not that good against an insurgency, even a one-rabbit one. Pretend to be manly but wearing a skirt. And, of course, an environmental policy that approves of completely demolishing the Earth.)

Here's a much less hypothetical option: what if the second one, instead of saying "the young volunteers in our all-volunteer military tend to be academic underachievers, for whom the military presents an attractive and economically rewarding option," had instead said "You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

If he had said this, the martian might think that the troops in Iraq would be annoyed at the implication that they got "stuck" there, as he put it, there because they couldn't arrange to get a decent education and that they didn't "make an effort to be smart," in which case they might think that the second man didn't have a lot of respect for them.

Kerry was not referring to soldiers. He was referring to Bush. Here is the first and final two paragraphs of Andrew Sullivan's most recent blog posting:

Maybe this story isn't over. I've been thoroughly persuaded by John Derbyshire and Christopher Hitchens that John Kerry's words were indeed a botched joke. The clincher for me was the actual prepared text, which I confess I hadn't seen till I watched the Daily Show (where I tend to get the news these days) last night. The actual text was that if you didn't work hard, "you end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush." ...

Now what do I next remember? I remember that the president vehemently went after Kerry, as did McCain. Now, when a president decides to do such a thing, his staff have examined the upsides and downsides every which way. They are paid to know any possible backfire for the remarks. And Rove is very smart. So this much I now know: knowing full well that he was deeply distorting Kerry's meaning, the president used the quote full-bore to impugn Kerry's commitment to the troops - and to help turn the base against the Democrats.

I know it's politics. I'm not naive. But it's also revealing about someone's character that he could authorize and exploit such a thing. Most fair-minded people will have to concede that, in retrospect, this was a very, very, very low blow. It hadn't sunk in for me till last night how low. In retrospect, this incident says much more about Bush than about Kerry. I'll bet I'm not the only one mulling that over this morning.