Halloween is a big holiday at the Kiosan household.  We've been adding bits and pieces since I started my own household several years ago, and the addition of the Kiosan boys has only added to the celebration.  This year, we concentrated on the graveyard:

We also had fog machines, a very witchy table  with jellied rain and candied guts, and a real black cat named Meow (who shall be blogged more thoroughly at a later date).  Parents from all over the local area stopped by to take pictures of their kids - we heathens find this very gratifying and are quite looking forward to next year.  Hubby has even agreed to building an 8-foot black widow and an electric chair for next year's haunt.  I am *so* psyched.

Today I was absolutely thrilled to pick up a few items at Spencer's 75% off sale: $500+ worth of material for just over $100 - color me one happy heathen.  The sound-activated chest-ripping zombie alone originally retailed for more than that.  Sweet.

John Kerry needed to apologize for the accidental bungling of a joke about Bush that inadvertently cast aspersions on rank and file troops, and he did.  Good.

The Bush administration, having nothing better to do, pounced on his remarks, in order to deflect attention from their complete ineptitude at governance to Kerry's inability to tell a scripted joke, as anyone with half a brain knew they would.  Par for the course.

But on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), self-confessed believer that Donald Rumsfeld is the "best thing to happen to the Pentagon in 25 years" took Kerry's error in speech an intentional step further and blamed the generals on the ground in Iraq  for the administration's total incompetence in directing our continuously devolving war:

House Majority Leader John Boehner: Wolf, I understand that, but let's not blame what's happening in Iraq on Rumsfeld.
Wolf Blitzer: But he's in charge of the military.
House Majority Leader John Boehner: But the fact is the generals on the ground are in charge and he works closely with them and the president.
Source: US Newswire

Boehner doesn't have the excuse of either bungling a joke or misspeaking.  If Kerry's accidental comment merited an apology, which it did, then Boehner's willfully blind defense of the incompetence that is Rumsfeld, particularly in light of retired generals' multiple avowals that the mulish Defense Secretary listens neither to grounded advice nor to any reason contrary to his own emphatic opinion, is inexcusable.  He owes the generals an apology for his deceitful exculpation of executive inadequacy achieved through shifting the blame from its rightful owners to the guys stuck with carrying out bad orders, he owes the American people an apology for insisting the misguided Rumsfeld is somehow beneficial to the country, and he owes an apology to his constituents for allowing partisan hackery to interfere with his duty to protect their interests.

Unfortunately, whereas Democrats are lately often characterized as weak for being thoughtful people who, even if belatedly, attempt to do the right thing with respect to this disastrous war, Republicans see dishonesty and intransigence as laudable virtues, rendering an apology from Boehner, on even the most superficial of levels, likely a physical impossibility.

In a country where blind partisanship is held in higher regard than ethical assessment, no wonder we have stunted adolescents for leaders.

John Kerry (D-MA) made a serious misstep yesterday when speaking at Pasadena City College.  After a series of one-liners regarding the Bush administration, he told the assembled students to study hard and make the most of their education, because if they don't they'll "end up stuck in Iraq."

Oy vey.

Kerry later said he fumbled the joke, garbling it in such a way that changed the meaning.  A spokeswoman said the prepared joke (as written in the speech) was meant to be:

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.

That's a different joke than the one Kerry ended up blurting out.

Right wing news sources are in an uproar over Kerry's comments, and the President, playing to a friendly crowd, sputtered out that Kerry needs to take it back because the troops are "plenty smart."  For his part, Kerry refuses to apologize, maintaining that the joke was meant to be about Bush, that the criticism of Bush is valid, and that it is Bush who needs to apologize to the troops for sending them into a war he had no clue how to fight.

I agree with Sen. Kerry on all but one point - that he does not need to apologize.  My friends on the left will probably be outraged by this, but I have my reasons, and it's not about fighting versus caving, but about choosing a battle we can win over one that offers, at best, a Pyrrhic victory which casts us not as the people who value the lives of our troops, but as the people who secretly disdain them - even though we know that is not true.  Truth matters not one whit to this adminstration, however, and the battle now is not over truth, but over marketing.

I know the Army has lowered its recruiting standards over the last year, and I've read statistics on what and infusion of Class IV recruits does to overall aptitude, and it's true that the least educated have few options and that military service is one of the few living wage avenues open to them, but none of that changes the fact that insulting the intelligence of every single service man and woman is a bad idea and is causing a political imbroglio that never needed to exist.

Kerry regrets not fighting the Swift Boaters who attacked him during his presidential run with more vigor, and I think he harbors a deep and genuine disdain for Bush.  I can appreciate his desire to stand up and fight back, I can.  I wish he had done it some time ago.  But this issue is not the issue; this stand is not the stand.  He does himself no favors here because the hard right cannot even hear his follow up over the din of their own manufactured outrage - contrived just in time for the midterm elections.

Believe me, I wish Kerry had gotten the joke right.  The Bush administration's collective failure to study and prepare for their war of choice is a more concrete insult to the troops than Kerry's "botched" joke.  Whereas Kerry insulted military intelligence and hurt some feelings, Bush et al insulted the entire nation's intelligence, continues to do it on a daily basis, got thousands of people maimed and killed, and intends to keep on keepin' on because the lives of the individual troops don't mean squat in their insulated, segregated, privileged, mean little existences.

But now Bush gets to rally around "plenty smart" troops as if mouthing a defense of their collective intelligence makes up for sending them to die for the lie du jour in his own private war. 

Unfortunately, I think Kerry should apologize for misspeaking.  I know it won't do his future presidential hopes much good to apologize, but, frankly, I don't know that not apologizing does his hopes any good, either.  Maybe he should just let go of those hopes at this point.  Regardless, we need to get the focus off of how a windsurfer thinks troops are stupid and back on to how a privileged class of neo-con elites think the entire world is nothing but a stupid game of Risk, with people as plastic playing pieces: sometimes frustrating, sometimes entertaining, but ultimately comfortably disposable.

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Update: According to Reuters, Kerry did apologize on this morning's Imus in the Morning show.  I don't care for Imus, so I neither watch nor listen to him and therefore missed the apology, to wit:

I said it was a botched joke. Of course, I'm sorry about a botched joke.

Better than Rush Limbaugh's non-apology for aping the uncontrollable movements associated with medication for advanced Parkinson's disease, but probably still not quite enough to make the kerfluffle go away.  Maybe if he'd managed it yesterday.  Today, I imagine many will demand something a little more strongly worded.