More on the Kerry Stupidity

Jean-Francoise Kerry was wrong on the facts:

The Armed Forces Qualifying test is basically a measure of IQ and is required of all recruits. It divides potential soldiers into categories I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IV, and V. Those who score in the bottom 10 percent (Category V) are disqualified completely, and the next 20 percent (Category IV) can never make up more than 4 percent of a year's recruits.

Every branch of the military is made up of more than 50 percent I to IIIa, in other words, the top-half of the general population. That means above-average IQs are more common in soldiers than in everyday Americans.

Looking more closely at the categories, a pattern consistent with the education trend emerges. Military personnel are over-represented in Categories II through IIIb (the 31st through 92nd percentiles of the general population), under-represented in Category IV (because of the 4 percent rule), and unrepresented in Category V. They are also under-represented in Category I--the top 7 percent of the general population, but only 2.9 to 5.8 percent of military recruits (depending on gender and service branch).

Soldiers, then, are bright people, a solid cut above the American public in high school education and IQ. It is true that few have been to college, and that the very brightest students tend not to join, but Kerry's stated (if possibly not intended) notion--that the military is a last resort for the slackers and Forrest Gumps of the world--is demonstrably false.

They must not have covered basic math at the Deuce Bigalow Academy Kerry attended.

He was wrong in implication:

Nevertheless, this is far from the first time Kerry has disparaged men and women in uniform. Indeed, his comments underscore his decades-long history of hurling insults and invective at military personnel.

Last December 4, Kerry told Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation: “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…”

While running for president, Kerry put forth the self-contradictory proposition that Bush unilaterally took America into Iraq to lead a multilateral Coalition of hapless fighters.

On September 6, 2004, Kerry trivialized the international boots on the ground that march right beside ours. He called this “the phoniest thing I’ve ever heard.” At that time, 124 foreign soldiers had been killed in non-phony combat in Iraq.

In September 2003, Kerry said, “This President’s pride has brought us a coalition of the few, barely willing to do anything at all: 160 Mongolians, 43 Estonians, and 83 Filipinos isn’t a coalition; it’s a cover-up.”

On March 13, 2003, Kerry described the then-46 nations supporting America’s liberation of Iraq as “a coalition of the coerced and the bribed.”

Kerry infamously told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971:

“We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.”

Kerry decried what he called “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....”

Kerry embraced the pronouncements of Vietnam War veterans at the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit that he helped organize earlier that year. As Kerry put it:

They 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.

Despite limited American atrocities in Vietnam, Kerry’s broad denunciation of his former comrades helped tar them as crazed American soldiers running amok through the jungles. This distortion is among the reasons why GIs received such cold and often hostile receptions once they returned home from Vietnam.

Kerry’s claim that he meant to joke about President Bush holds little water. Like Kerry himself, Bush graduated from Yale. Bush then went on to earn an MBA from the Harvard Business School, no small feat. An HBS MBA is no less impressive than Kerry’s Boston College law degree. Based on their military entrance exams, Human Biodiversity Institute founder Steve Sailer calculated that Bush has an IQ of 123, while Kerry has a 120. So, even on its own terms, Kerry’s “joke” is neither funny nor accurate.

He was wrong on the politics:

Senator Kerry now claims that it was a “botched joke,” meaning that President Bush didn’t get a good education and that he has gotten the country stuck in Iraq. Even if we bend over backward to believe that Kerry didn’t really mean what he said, but had simply messed up the punch line, his follow-up statement later on only made matters worse.

He said he would “apologize to no one” that if anyone would believe that “a veteran, someone like me,” would “somehow criticize more than 140,000 troops serving in Iraq” then “they’re crazy.”

Maybe Senator Kerry has a bad memory — or maybe he is counting on the rest of us having a bad memory. He criticized more than 140,000 troops serving in Vietnam, making sweeping and unsubstantiated accusations against them of widespread atrocities back in the 1970s.

He criticized them at home and abroad, giving aid and comfort to our enemies in wartime. That is what first got the Swift Boat veterans after him, years before he ran for president in 2004.

Regardless of whether we believe Kerry’s account of his service in Vietnam or the very different accounts by many who served in the same unit with him there, military service does not confer lifetime immunity from criticism for what you do afterwards. Benedict Arnold was a military hero during the Revolutionary War. But General Arnold changed his mind on that war, just as Senator Kerry has changed his mind on the war in Iraq — and no one has claimed that Benedict Arnold’s earlier military service made him exempt from criticism.

He was even wrong on what constitutes a joke.

Has there ever been a bigger moron than Jean-Francoise Kerry get within a few electoral votes of the supreme office in the land?

I wonder if the Kerry voters ever feel grateful that Ohioans helped them dodge a bullet.