John Kerry's fighting talk

According to media reports, Senator John Kerry has thrown a potentially big spanner into the Democrats' steady progress towards victory in the mid-term elections next Tuesday. The party's presidential nominee two years ago told an audience of college students in California on Monday that if they didn't study hard they could end up 'stuck in Iraq'.

The Republicans have responded with a lovely line in mock outrage, epitomised by President Bush:

Even in the midst of a heated campaign season, there are still some things we should be able to agree on; and one of the most important is that every one of our troops deserves our gratitude and respect. The senator's suggestion that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting and shameful.

This from a party which has spent the last week engaged in one of the filthiest smear campaigns against its opponents in recent US political history.

But while the Republicans' response was predictable, Kerry's counter-attack will come as a bit of a shock to those who remember the slightly lame way the senator responded in 2004 to the attacks on his Vietnam war record by the Bush-backing Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Describing those who had attacked him as 'right-wing nut jobs', Kerry went on:

If anyone thinks a veteran would criticise the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy. I'm sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did. I'm not going to be lectured by a stuffed-suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J Fox's Parkinson's disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have

If Kerry had shown a little more of that kind of fighting talk two years ago, it may well have been him, and not Bush, sat in the Oval Office today.

Comments

[swatantra nandanwar]

Fighting talk from Kerry, but it still wouldn't have done him any good. He would still have lost. The Dems were, and are, up against the dirtiest fighters on the planet; these Republicans will stop at nothing to get their man in. Look at the dirt piled on by Nixon on Humphrey and Reagan had it in for Carter and Bush Snr did the dirt on, I can't remember. So don't expect them to take defeat lying down in 2008.