OK- I just accidentally clicked away from this page after typing up a fairly long blog entry. So I'm going to retype it, but it will have a more cynical tone that it did the first time
About John Kerry's smear of the troops in Iraq:
-I don't think that he actually meant to smear the troops. Let's face it- he's a highly successful politician, and isn't going to shoot himself in the foot. At least not this time around. If you read what he said and take it as a given that he meant to insult the president, it makes sense, although the language itself is kind of tortured. So what do I think happened?
-That said, I think the only way to describe what he said (other than as hideously offensive) is as a Freudian slip.  It's been clear to anyone who's wanted to look for it that he is disdainful of the troops, and that has been since the day he got back from Vietnam. It's just his bad luck that his slip of the tongue revealed the way he felt with impeccably bad timing.
-This would explain his bizarre sequence of angry counter attacks and nonapologies. He didn't even see why he needed to apologize for something that, at least privately, he felt was true.
-I think there was another element. He fundamentally made a miscalculation. Because he sincerely believes that only a moron who had no other option would voluntarily go to Iraq, he didn't see how offensive that implication is to the rest of the country. (The "I served in the military" defense doesn't work here- does anyone actually believe he would have gone voluntarily?) So, he thought that by agressively counterattacking rather than apologizing, he would appeal to the segment of the population that intensely opposes the war, without significantly alienating the rest of the population
-MAJOR COINCIDENCE- the people that he tried to appeal to will be a sizable chunk of voters in Democratic primaries come 2008.
-But as I said, he had made a mistake. When he finally realized how much damage he had done, he issued enough of an apology to cover himself in the MSM. Although I think that the apology itself was sufficient, he still wrapped it in an attack on Republican distortion, so as to not lose face with his potential primary base.
-Trivia question: who was that last politician who tried to do what Kerry is going to have to do to get the nomination in 2008? Unless I missed something in 2005, the answer is Howard Dean.
-That's a bad sign for Kerry. Look at where Dean is now- he became the sweetheart of the Angry Left, but when people realized how much he had repulsed mainstream America, he didn't even get the nomination when they went looking for someone who could win. (Or at least come within 100000 "stolen" Ohio votes of winning.) But by that time, he was in a position where he had alienated so much of mainstream America that he could never really hold a conventional elected office again. (No, Governor of VT doesn't count.) So he got the only job in Politics where the animosity of both the other party and of moderates is a plus: chairman of the Democrat party.
-I'm looking forward to the Kerry-Dean matchup for that job once Kerry has removed himself from ever winning a National nomination.
That's all for today. I think that I lost quality in rewriting, but at least I learned a valuable lesson about saving your drafts as you go.
Oh- and here: America's bravest salute "Jon Carry"