Oooh, SNAP

Kerry is such a tool. I get that he may have been making a joke at the expense of the President, but if he had any objectivity he would a) consider his history of insulting not only the troops at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, but his own Secret Service detail in 2004, b) understand that HE said what he said, it wasn't a GOP dirty trick that he bobbled his line, and c) hold a press conference in which he read from the DoD statistics about how the average recruit scores higher than the rest of the population in reading and aptitude tests, and how in fact the Armed Forces are overall one of the best-educated portions of the American society. Followed by an apology for any offense.

His attempts to reframe his comments or defend them are only prolonging this little grease fire, at a rather poor time for the Democrats. They'd rather be talking about anything else, instead of parsing language and trying to back and fill for their 2004 Presidential candidate. This should have been a one-day story if Kerry had handled it well. He didn't. Now we'll be lucky if this gets off the front pages by Friday, and isn't sucking all the oxygen out of the Democratic message on Sunday as well. Strictly from a problem-nanagement standpoint, this is a superb example of what not to do.

And yes, the GOP is piling on, but seriously -- if the Democrats can't handle asymmetric warfare in an election, what makes you believe they can handle it in the real world?

"Don't load your enemies' guns for them" is some good anti-malpractice advice I have gotten. The other common-sense advice is "When you're in a hole, stop digging."