Musings about the Kerry mess

I've been thinking about this for a while........

Some of the lies that have been told about Kerry's Vietnam service are breathtaking. How in the world could the Kerry crowd trip so badly? Usually campaigns will go through an extensive vetting process and prepare for just about any contingency with some sort of talking point that, if it doesn't explain away the problem, at least obfuscates it successfully enough not to harm the candidate too badly.

So what made the campaign collapse so badly? I think it's the same thing that killed the Dukakis campaign. The liberals despise the use of force. They'd rather negotiate for peace and, in the plaintive words of Rodney King, "just get along". They don't want to get their hands dirty with the real business of maintaining freedom - dying. It's....uncivilized.

One of the purposes of the military is to die on our behalf. That's right. We send young men and women in harm's way because they are willing to die so we can live. It's the "no greater thing" that a man can do - lay down his life for his fellow man. If someone won't do it willingly, then some of us will be forced to do it at times.

That's what happened on 9/11. Almost 3,000 of our citizens gave their lives in the cause of freedom, and only some of them had the opportunity to make the choice beforehand. (The firefighters, the police, the military in the Pentagon and the brave folks on flight 93 come to mind.)

The military deserves our utmost respect and admiration. Good men and woman go in to harm's way and put their lives on the line so that we can sit at home and argue about what economic policy makes the most sense and who's going to win the ball game next week.

LIberals don't understand that. They want to eat their hors d'oeuvres, sip their champagne, save the earth and the animals and let someone else worry about the problems evil men create. Since they don't understand and refuse to face the reality of a world where not everyone is nice and cooperative, they don't see the need for the nasty, dirty business of war. They'd rather that someone else took care of that, if necessary.

So when Kerry said he was a hero and showed them his medals neatly framed on his wall, they took him at his word and never felt the need to vet his bona fides. Had they done so, they never would have been in the mess they're in now. They would have either toned down his rhetoric or obfuscated some of the more difficult details.

After all, liberals couldn't possibly be stupid enough to think that Kerry actually could have gotten away with this.

Could they?