Sometimes Politicians Tell the Truth

He says he meant to say the joke as it was written by his speech writers: “Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.”

But what he said was: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

His apology went like this: “As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loves ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop. 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.”

Why did Kerry make the slip? My guess: he's a combat veteran and so he knows that soldiers in Iraq are mostly poor people who didn't do well in school and have limited options. Sometimes politicians slip up and tell the truth. The scandal should be the plight of the American underclass, not the politician who accidentally made reference to it.

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