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.