EXCUSES FOR KERRY FALL FLAT

As Rush predicted yesterday, the lamestream media have been falling all over themselves trying to excuse Jean-Francois Kerry's Freudian slip as a "botched joke."Kerry called Don Imus this morning to complain:

But on the other hand, it’s just a disgraceful thing when people try to assert that somebody like me, who has spent 35 years of my life fighting for veterans, standing up for veterans, fighting for their combat pay, fighting for Agent Orange recognition, fighting for their armor, fighting for their up-armored Humvees, fighting for them to have a strategy that wins, fighting to honor them that the notion that this comment was directed at them is an insult by these guys, and they know it.

Now why would anyone assert that? Maybe it's because we remember Kerry's disgraceful testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he alleged:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

Kerry's assertions, of course were false. Some of those "highly decorated veterans" were never in Vietnam at all, and the "Winter Soldier Investigation" did not in fact uncover a single verifiable American war crime. Wittingly or unwittingly, Kerry's 1971 testimony harmonized perfectly with the KGB's worldwide campaign to cast America as the criminal aggressor in Vietnam.

And his disparaging throwaway comments yesterday harmonize perfectly with Al Qaeda's campaign to demoralize American troops and the American people.

Only this time, instead of an acquiescent audience of ultra-liberal Democratic Senators willing to accept Kerry's lies and help him spread them throughout the country, he has been met by the plainspoken and clear-headed indignation of Senator John McCain, President Bush, and many others.

And let's not forget Jean-Francois Kerry's shameful comments to Bob Schieffer last year, when he said:

"And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the – of – the historical customs, religious customs," Kerry said Sunday.

To Jean-Francois Kerry, our brave soldiers, our brave, intelligent, highly trained, and well educated soldiers have never been better than the terrorists from whom they have protected us, whether in Vietnam or in Iraq.

And one last thing. Even if it were true that America's soldiers were poor, struggling, uneducated men and women, they would still be deserving of nothing less than our utmost respect, admiration, and gratitude.