Kerry wipes an eye while speaking at Davos

Howie Carr, at the Boston Herald, pens a eulogy to a great American political career.

Do you suppose (John Kerry)’ll put in now for one final Purple Heart? He was wounded by Iraq, after all. It’s gotta hurt, knowing that he and Al Gore are in one of the world’s tiniest clubs: guys who blew an election to George W. Bush.

But here’s the difference. Al Gore has actually been nominated this year. For a couple of Academy Awards. And he may win. John Kerry, though, well, he’s about to find out whether or not the old saying is true: “Living well is the best revenge.”..

..for Kerry, this is a tragedy. He always knew he’d be president. He’s still only 63 – older than Bush, or Clinton, or even Al Gore – and it’s over.

He’ll never be president. America dodged another bullet.

And here’s the greatest irony of all: John Kerry was the absolute last person in the world to know it was all over…

A line comes to mind from F. Scott Fitzgerald, as John and Mama T leave the national scene like Tom and Daisy Buchanan at the end of “The Great Gatsby,” retreating “back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together . . . drift(ing) here and there unrestfully, wherever people played polo and were rich together.”

Good riddance.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

The left side of the Blogosphere has been cackling with glee over apparent disproof of the recent John Kerry spurned by troops, eating alone in Iraq story.

Greg Sargent provided the refutation.

it turns out that Kerry was at that table to conduct an off-the-record breakfast discussion with two reporters, so there would have been no reason whatsover for troops to be sitting with them. In fact, Kerry and the reporters even sought out empty seats, I’m told.

The two reporters who met with Kerry that morning are Marc Santora of The New York Times and Mark Danner of The New York Review, The New Yorker and other publications. Both Santora and Danner confimed to me that they met with Kerry — on the morning of Dec. 17, according to Kerry’s office and to Danner. (The person who posted the photo also confirmed that it was taken that morning.)

Danner confirmed to me that he’s the guy with his back to the camera, saying his jacket and the back of his head looked the same as in the photo. He added that his position in relation to Kerry was the same as the photo showed. And here’s what Danner had to say to me about the empty seats: “If there were empty seats it’s because we sought them out. We wanted an empty table so we could talk. It’s that simple.”

The left’s joy is prompted by an opportunity to get the better of Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnson, Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson of Power-line, and an assortment of lesser right bloggers, including yours truly who took Scott Hennen‘s correspondent’s word for its veracity.

This is a true story…..Check out this photo from our mess hall at the US Embassy yesterday morning. Sen. Kerry found himself all alone while he was over here. He cancelled his press conference because no one came, he worked out alone in the gym w/o any soldiers even going up to say hi or ask for an autograph (I was one of those who was in the gym at the same time), and he found himself eating breakfast with only a couple of folks who are obviously not troops.

Well, I certainly have no capability of investigating how well John Kerry was received by interviewing witnesses in Iraq, but common sense does suggest he would not be the most popular political figure in the heart of the typical serviceman.

Mr. Sargent’s refutation consists of a context supplied to that photograph by a couple of liberal journalists who work for liberal publications. These would be exactly the same sort of journalists who assisted Mr. Kerry in repackaging his “‘If you study hard, you get ahead in this life, and if you don’t, you’re going to wind up in Iraq” comment as a failed anti-Bush joke. Why should anyone be willing to take their word about something like this?

Scott Hennen received the above photo of John Kerry at breakfast from a friend in Iraq.

This is a true story…..Check out this photo from our mess hall at the US Embassy yesterday morning. Sen. Kerry found himself all alone while he was over here. He cancelled his press conference because no one came, he worked out alone in the gym w/o any soldiers even going up to say hi or ask for an autograph (I was one of those who was in the gym at the same time), and he found himself eating breakfast with only a couple of folks who are obviously not troops.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

In today’s Washington Post, John Kerry counsels retreat, withdrawal, and surrender, invoking the memory of Winston Churchill.

President Bush and all of us who grew up in the shadows of World War II remember Winston Churchill — his grit, his daring, his resolve. I remember listening to his speeches on a vinyl album in the pre-iPod era. Two years ago I spoke about Iraq at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., where Churchill had drawn a line between freedom and fear in his “iron curtain” speech. In preparation, I reread some of the many words from various addresses that made him famous. Something in one passage caught my eye. When Churchill urged, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in,” he added: “except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

This is a time for such convictions.

Kerry (or the flunky assigned to draft this pathetic screed for him) evidently thinks his own (and his party’s) pettiness and cowardice can be effectively transmuted into their opposites by mere verbal association with Churchill’s courage and strength. He’s wrong.

Mark Steyn discusses John Kerry and his party.

what (Kerry) said fits what too many upscale Dems believe: that America’s soldiers are only there because they’re too poor and too ill-educated to know any better. That’s what they mean when they say “we support our troops.” They support them as victims, as children, as potential welfare recipients, but they don’t support them as warriors and they don’t support the mission.

So their “support” is objectively worthless. The indignant protest that “of course” “we support our troops” isn’t support, it’s a straddle, and one that emphasizes the Democrats’ frivolousness in the post-9/11 world. A serious party would have seen the jihad as a profound foreign-policy challenge they needed to address credibly. They could have found a Tony Blair — a big mushy-leftie pantywaist on health and education and all the other sissy stuff, but a man at ease with the projection of military force in the national interest. But we saw in Connecticut what happens to Democrats who run as Blairites: You get bounced from the ticket. In the 2004 election, instead of coming to terms with it as a national security question, the Democrats looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue they needed to neutralize. And so they signed up with the weirdly incoherent narrative of John Kerry — a celebrated anti-war activist suddenly “reporting for duty” as a war hero and claiming that, even though the war was a mistake and his comrades were murderers and rapists, his four months in the Mekong rank as the most epic chapter in the annals of the Republic.

Read the whole thing.

John Kass, writing from Chicago, pays due homage to John Kerry’s unique personal contribution to this Fall’s electoral contest.

“Is Kerry getting paid by the Republicans?” asked the young, cat-hating liberal who helps me with the column. “Did [White House strategist] Karl Rove pay him or what?”

What would you pay a guy to slice off his party’s feet in the last week of a campaign that is the Democrats’ to lose?..

Kerry’s ridiculous elitism, burbling out of him as if he lives, as I suspect, entirely on a diet of lentils and club soda, is what the Republicans needed. It’s a big chunk of wood floating just above Republican hands in deep water.

Read the whole thing.

And conservative talk radio was alive today (I was out running errands a lot) with the wives of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq, seething with indignation at Kerry’s slur. Sean Hannity compared Kerry’s “I botched a joke aimed at Bush” explanation to his explanation that “it was somebody else’s medals he threw away,” and to Kerry’s “I don’t own an SUV. The family has it.”

It’s true. Kerry has built up an impressive record of obvious and shameless lies, brazenly advanced whenever he finds himself in trouble. How anyone can choose to believe Kerry over his fellow Swift Boat Veterans about his service in Vietnam is beyond me.

Hat tip to LGF.

N.Z. Bear puts his finger on just why Kerry got into so much trouble for what was just a passing remark.

Why are some folks being so sensitive about Kerry’s remarks — and why are they right to be so?

The key phrase we’re looking for here is “never again”. If people like Kerry — and indeed Kerry himself — had not been responsible for destroying the morale and reputation of the American military after Vietnam, we wouldn’t have to be sensitive to jokes like his failed one. But they did, and we do, because we absolutely cannot allow what happened to the soldiers of that era to begin happening to those of ours.

And the source here matters. If John McCain had made Kerry’s remarks, we’d be astounded, but McCain’s history would argue in his favor and we’d grant him the benefit of the doubt. But Kerry’s history does the opposite: his past exploits and efforts to drag the reputation of American soldiers through the mud are absolutely relevant and mean he doesn’t get to pretend that nobody could ever think he’d say something denigrating about the military. If you’ve never been known to raise your hand in anger towards a woman, you can crack a joke about beating your wife and get away with it (even if you shouldn’t). But if you’ve got a history of beating your wife, you don’t get to make jokes about beating your wife without bringing the full weight of society’s suspicion and opprobrium down on you.

John Kerry is a smooth article, but the soft life of ultra-privilege has taken its toll. Yesterday, while bloviating away before a youthful audience (in typical politico fashion) on the desirability of education, Kerry spectacularly put his foot in it.

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And he did this days before a bitterly contested election deciding control of both houses of Congress.

Naturally, his adversaries behaved precisely as John Kerry would have in their position, seeing a floundering adversary in trouble, they proceeded to hand him a rock.

Republicans criticized his remark, and demanded an apology. Kerry fought back, attempting a clever save by claiming his condescending reference was really aimed at President Bush. Right, John. Two points for chutzpah.

Allahpundit has a nice summary of the truckload of bricks landing on the deserving Mr. Kerry.

Well, he is a fellow Yalie, so I feel obliged to offer Senator Kerry a little advice: apologize; reveal that you were molested as a child and consequently have self-esteem issues leading to your belittling all your fellow Americans who did not attend St. Paul’s, become president of the Yale Political Union, and get tapped for Bones; then announce that you will at once be entering rehab.

Two old Yale Political Union debaters clashed at Senate hearings on John Bolton’s confirmation as UN Ambassador.

And John Bolton. former Conservative Party Chairman, Yale Class of 1970, got the better of John Kerry, former Liberal Party Chairman, Yale Class of 1966.

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At the end of last month, for reasons of his own which are difficult for the rest of us to fathom, John Kerry launched a new campaign of press statements replying to the charges about his awards and military record made by fellow Swift Boat Veterans during his 2004 presidential campaign.

The Swift Boat Veterans’ attacks on Kerry’s record, and the associated book, unquestionably demolished Kerry’s “reporting for duty” campaign theme, and Kerry’s failure during the course of the campaign to release his military records and to reply effectively to the veterans’ charges did not go unnoticed by the voters.

More recently, Kerry seems to have decided that everyone has discarded his copy of Unfit for Command, and forgotten all the details, and he evidently thinks it’s now safe to go around striking martyred poses in front of the obliging liberal media.

Well, John Kerry is wrong. Not everyone has forgotten, and it is not safe, as Thomas Lipscomb demonstrates with a detailed review of Kerry’s first-Purple Heart-producing skimmer mission.

The pictures make it obvious.

John Kerry is boasting that he is in the best position of democrat contenders to run in 2008, because he has an email list of more than 3 million unsound souls. Some members of the Blogosphere left are not eager to repeat the experience of 2004, and are suggesting that left-wingers should do something about this, and let John Kerry know just how they feel about him. I love it.

Hat tip to Mickey Kaus.