A Slip Of The Quip

Mark Steyn positively skewers John "Topper" Kerry in the Chicago Sun-Times. More than that, he exposes the real problem that Kerry and those like him pose for the Democrats.

Whatever he may or may not have intended (and "I was making a joke about how stupid Bush is but I'm the only condescending liberal in America too stupid to tell a Bush-is-stupid joke without blowing it" must rank as one of the all-time lame excuses), what he said fits what too many upscale Dems believe: that America's soldiers are only there because they're too poor and too ill-educated to know any better. That's what they mean when they say "we support our troops." They support them as victims, as children, as potential welfare recipients, but they don't support them as warriors and they don't support the mission.

So their "support" is objectively worthless. The indignant protest that "of course" "we support our troops" isn't support, it's a straddle, and one that emphasizes the Democrats' frivolousness in the post-9/11 world. A serious party would have seen the jihad as a profound foreign-policy challenge they needed to address credibly. They could have found a Tony Blair — a big mushy-leftie pantywaist on health and education and all the other sissy stuff, but a man at ease with the projection of military force in the national interest. But we saw in Connecticut what happens to Democrats who run as Blairites: You get bounced from the ticket. In the 2004 election, instead of coming to terms with it as a national security question, the Democrats looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue they needed to neutralize. And so they signed up with the weirdly incoherent narrative of John Kerry — a celebrated anti-war activist suddenly "reporting for duty" as a war hero and claiming that, even though the war was a mistake and his comrades were murderers and rapists, his four months in the Mekong rank as the most epic chapter in the annals of the Republic.

This one is a classic, definitely worth the read. Steyn sees the same thing many of us do: there is a condescension toward the military among those in the Democratic party. In those narratives that emerge from too many Dems, the troops are either dimwits, poor or children incapable of making good decisions. You can see it almost every day in the media somewhere. And people like Joe Lieberman, who do not act that way toward the troops, are not welcome in the Democratic party today. Or at least not in the party that the left fringe wants the Dems to be.