'At last I have found the ideal soldier who will keep quiet and carry out orders without arguing.'
Cartoon by Robert Minor from Golos Truda (Petrograd, October 27, 1917)

For what it's worth, I believe what Kerry says he really meant. The very first time I heard it, it sounded like a typically poorly thought out Bush-dummy quasi-joke. Ace is rightly having a great time with this, and if it actually helps us to hold onto the House, I'm all for it. Ace earned it with his grueling obsession for 'consistency' (I don't quite concur that what he was talking about was really consistency and not a Dowdish conviction that similarities between two different things make them exactly the SAME thing).

This feels like a good opportunity to say that Ace (and others) seem to me, during bouts of Coulter denounciation, to implicitly deny that there is any non-partisanly subjective component to whether one finds a given statement gobsmackingly vile or not. Some of us, when presented with a statement that can be taken in more than one way, strongly tend to take it in the least offensive way. In other words, my failure to condem Ann and Rush does not indicate that I think they can do no wrong, any more than my refusal to now condemn Kerry indicates that I think HE can do no wrong. I just don't take things that way as a rule, and I kind of think people who do are assholes.

However, there are reasons besides partisanship and offenceaholism for people to suspect that Kerry meant that soldiers are retards. It's always been an inevitable side effect of the unconstrained vision of the left. In the case of leftists who have served in the military, it has the additional seductive quality of appearing self-deprecating, while elevating the individuals over the common masses with which they served.