This is a must-read from John Kerry’s hometown newspaper.

Who’s the real flunky? Someone tell Kerry it’s not military
By Michael Graham
Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Most election years, I’m a W.C. Fields American: I never vote for anyone, I always vote against. And if ever there was an election that cried out for Freddy Kruger-esque political bloodletting, it’s this one.

As Henry Kissinger once said of the Iran-Iraq war, “It’s a shame both sides can’t lose.”

Then I read what Sen. John Kerry (D-My Wife’s Enormous Bank Vault) had to say at a rally at Pasadena City College. Suddenly, I’m motivated. For the first time in years, I have someone to vote for.

My vote will go to those American kids “stuck” in the military in Iraq.

You know, those (as John Kerry imagines them) barely-literate clods in the U.S. military? Those under-achievers whose life prospects are so utterly limited that their only career options are crime, telemarketing and - horrors - the Army?

It’s enough to make a man shudder in the morning as he waits for his limo outside his (wife’s) palatial estate.

Those poor, pathetic souls standing watch in Afghanistan and Iraq. If only they’d worked harder in school, focused more on athletics - a polo scholarship, maybe. Instead, Democrats like John Kerry see them for what they truly are: The dregs of society, the bottom of the social and economic barrel.

Kerry isn’t the only Democrat who understands how badly our soldiers are “stuck.”

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) spoke for many Democrats when he commented recently that the members of America’s armed forces “clearly come from the lowest economic echelon we have.”

Democratic opponents of the war in Iraq often complain that not enough of the soldiers serving are sons of congressmen and senators. Of course, many of these same Democrats wouldn’t send their kids off to public schools, much less public service in the U.S. military.

But are Kerry, Rangel and their fellow liberals right about our soldiers being “stuck” with military service?

Well, unemployment is below 5 percent, which means there are plenty of jobs for even the dopiest of Americans. And given that every officer in the military is required to have a college degree, it’s not like they’ve got limited prospects. (Some 92 percent of all enlistees have high school diplomas, by the way, compared with 79 percent of the American population).

In fact, a new study by the Heritage Foundation finds that “wartime U.S. military enlistees are better educated, wealthier and more rural on average than their civilian peers.”

And then there’s this overlooked fact: Since 9/11, thousands of young Americans from every walk of life have joined the military with the purpose and intention of putting themselves in harm’s way, in order to keep the rest of us out of harm.

John Kerry looks at these young people and sees losers. Charlie Rangel sees desperate dead-enders. If the Democrats win on Tuesday, our soldiers in Iraq will look up at CNN International and see these two men leering back at them, flush with victory.

I cannot cast that vote.

I’m going to vote for the suckers, the chumps, the kids from bottom of the barrel. As they patrol the streets of Baghdad and kick down doors in Kandahar, they’re going to know that, back home, at least one geeky guy in one lonely voter’s booth has their back.

America’s soldiers may be among the least impressive people John Kerry knows, but they’re doing the most important job in the world. It’s a job that Sen. Kerry’s pinot-drinking, Sartre-reading Euro-weenie pals aren’t willing to do.

These are the folks who’ve got my vote on Tuesday.

Amen!

I think Kerry’s comments, while asinine and inappropriate, have done something to remind the American public just what these Democrats think about our military. And it is the underpinning for the entire anti-war movement. They simply think they’re intellectually elite and therefore can save the world through debate and diplomacy. That’s why they look down on our soldiers with contempt, and view them as murdering thugs who can only resort to violence because they can’t use their brains. This mentality is pervasive on the liberal Left. They think the world’s problems can be dealt with over hot tea and caviar… if we’d only leave them to do their hard, intellectual work. But the enemy we’re fighting in the war on terror has no interest in diplomacy, or debates, or discussions.

They’re blinded by their self-appointed elitism and refuse to see that our military, while capable of ruthlessly destroying the enemy, is also comprised of engineers, technologists, doctors, lawyers, operators of the world’s most sophisticated equipment - and as a collective unit have a 23% higher graduation rate than the general civilian population.

But to them, they’re just a bunch of dumb kids from the wrong side of the tracks… who couldn’t hack it in the real world.

UPDATE:
Like I said, this wasn’t just a single instance that Kerry can dismiss as a “botched joke”. This is a mindset he’s carried with him for years.

In 1972, as he ran for the House, he was less apologetic in his comments about the merits of a volunteer army. He declared in the questionnaire that he opposed the draft but considered a volunteer army “a greater anathema.”

“I am convinced a volunteer army would be an army of the poor and the black and the brown”

The mindset is condescending and flat wrong.