Arrogance Kills

So the other day, Mrs. Tuff took Tuff Jr. into Boston and picked up our 18 year old from her dorm. While I was happy to have the entire family back under one roof, they did come home sooner than expected, and less than halfway through my recently acquired DVD, "Jenna Jameson Does the Dude Ranch." Right at the part where Rocky the Quarter Horse learns to remove Jenna's bra with his massive teeth, they charged into the house and let me tell you it was an uncomfortable moment to say the least. It didn't help that I was wearing my "All Women are Blithering Idiots" t-shirt, either.

As I stared at their faces, each turning shades more closely resembling my last lobster dinner, I said the only thing that came to my mind: "Gosh, I'm really sorry that you are offended by this."

So I can understand what John Kerry is going through right now. Just in case you have been living under a rock for the past few days, at a rally for California Democrat gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, John Francois Kerry said the following:

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/10/30/politics/p174330S38.DTL&type=politics

Note the quote from Angelides at the bottom of the SFGate article: "We are going to make history." And boy have they ever.

The bruhaha has shown no sign of slowing down. Whether Kerry is trying to look strong in the face of adversity (AKA not be swift-boated again) or simply maintain his air of intellectual superiority, every step he has taken since has landed him in bigger and bigger cow-pies.

First there was the defiant non-apology posted on his web site:

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.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=23164_Kerry_Goes_Ballistic&only
http://www.johnkerry.com/news/releases/release.html?id=33

I wonder if this means Kerry wants only military veterans to disgust him. That's fine with me. It worked two years ago like a charm. Next there was the 'botched joke' non-apology on "Imus in the Morning" (a show I never listen to anymore since Don Imus reminds me too much of Madeline Albright):

A day after rejecting calls to apologize for his remarks, Kerry, appearing on the "Imus in the Morning" radio show on MSNBC, declared: "I said it was a botched joke. Of course, I'm sorry about a botched joke."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061101/pl_nm/usa_elections_kerry_dc

This one is just full of crap. Kerry said what he meant and meant what he said. Only the bluest of liberal Kool-Aid drinkers can believe Kerry has a high opinion of the US military, or that he can relate to someone who is happy just to get their bills paid every month. Yet even at this point, he does not directly address the content of his statements, only the misexecution of an alleged joke. Are we to expect that this was a slip of the tongue from someone who testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 as follows:

"They [US Service men in Viet Nam] 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."

...and said the following to Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation on December 4th of 2005:

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.
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/face_120405.pdf

The piling on has continued. Campaign invitations for John Kerry are drying up faster than Scotch bottles at the Kennedy Estate in Hyannis:

A congressional candidate in Iowa said swiftly he no longer wanted him to appear at a scheduled rally. Kerry abandoned plans to attend events in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. "Whatever the intent, Senator Kerry was wrong to say what he said. He needs to apologize to our troops," said Rep. Harold Ford Jr., locked in a close Senate race in Tennessee.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/11/01/D8L4H6DO0.html

And now for the Johnny Gigolo's third non-apology, we get a written statement (how brave!):

"I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform and I personally apologize to any service member, family member or American who was offended," Kerry said in a statement.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061101/pl_nm/usa_elections_kerry_dc

Note that he never admits what he said was WRONG. He is sorry that his words were "misinterpreted". Clearly it takes a big man to admit he made a mistake and sincerely mean it, and clearly, Lurch is not a big man at all. A sincere man would also do this in person, in front of the largest audience he can find, not hiding behind a piece of paper or a web server somewhere.

The amount of energy put into a real apology is nothing compared to what is being spent on his latest political death-spiral. But John Francois simply cannot be seen as anything other than the smartest man in the room. He is too important to be bothered with such petty humility. What he does not realize is that arrogance kills and is never forgotten.

I could elaborate more on this, but I have to go and rustle up a DVD out of the trash can.

(ps. Just in case I do run for a public office someday, I will now state for the record that I do not, nor have I ever owned a Jenna Jameson DVD - at least one that included a horse named rocky.)