Hitchens on Kerrygate

posted at 3:22 pm on November 4, 2006 by Allahpundit
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The front-page thumbnail comes from B5, who was at the Air Force-Army game last night. Click for full-size.

Hitch thinks Kerry probably meant what he said as a joke on Bush, but acknowledges that servicemen might hear it differently — not because they’re uneducated or because the number of troops from America’s lower class is too many but because the number from America’s upper class is too few.

The senator’s labored defense of himself is so lame that it has to be true. He had intended (pause for thigh-slapping and guffawing) to make a truly original joke about the IQ and educational level of the chief executive. His crack team of gag-writers had toiled on the joke and combed all the bugs out of it. It was there, poised on the pad and ready for launch. And it fizzled. (Funny–that punchline usually activates the easy-laugh track, as Messrs. Leno, Stewart, Maher and Colbert demonstrate with airy ease practically every night of the week.) And out of the syntactic chaos came the impression that Mr. Kerry thought only a dumb jerk could end up in uniform in Iraq.

No wonder Mr. Kerry feels hard done-by: He can’t recount a joke that practically tells itself and has been road-tested to work with almost Pavlovian certainty, especially on campuses. Surely everybody–any fool, in fact–knows that it’s Mr. Bush who is supposed to have the difficulties with timing and articulation? Ah, the unfairness of it all. The senator was all in favor of the joke before he actually had to tell it. Haven’t we been here before?…

I have since had the chance to read about 500 or 600 [e-mail] messages [from servicemen]. Almost all of them politely phrased (I exempt one from “the Riordan family” who evidently have not forgiven the long history of British depredation in Ireland) and almost all of them appending the list of college degrees as well as of medals and citations held, these letters show a very deep and interesting rift in which Mr. Kerry plays only a secondary part. Many of my respondents agreed that his words may not have meant or intended quite what they first seemed to mean, but they also felt that the klutziness was Freudian, so to speak, in that the senator’s patrician contempt for grunts and dogfaces was bound to come out sooner or later.

One thing I already knew is confirmed–there is a very great deal of class resentment in these United States. Another thing I wasn’t so sure of is also confirmed–James Webb in Virginia is right to stress the huge rage felt by those of Scots-Irish provenance who feel that they have born the heat and burden of the day in America’s wars, and been rewarded with disdain.

Even my most relaxed soldier-correspondent from Iraq itself (a highly educated friend of faultlessly Irish extraction) confessed to a feeling of irritation at the few chances he had to meet Ivy League types in uniform.

Dan Riehl has video of Cheney showing Waffles how to tell a joke. Click the image to watch.

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