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On Wednesday 01 November 2006 21:43, Jonathan King wrote: > Well, actually...who cares? This happened days ago, Kerry apologized > for the appearance of offense, but said it was the result of him > garbling up the telling of a (pretty cheesy, if you ask me) joke. > Whether or not you like or agree with any of this, it's quite frankly > not important. Well, if you watched him, it did not look like he was trying to tell a joke. He delivered it all with a straight face and tone, leading a lot of people to believe that's what he meant to say. When it didn't have the effect he intended, then he said that it was a botched joke. I can't tell if Kerry is telling the truth or not if it really was a bothched joke, but he just dissed on every person in the armed forces whether he meant to or not. I find it hard to believe that hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their families shrug it off as "not important." Sometimes comments that are made that are not even botched but simply misinterpreted can lead to people getting in lots of trouble. If you remember Trent Lott being forced to resign over saying at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party that his state was proud of having Thurmond represent it and that Thurmond would have been a good president. Lott meant that Thurmond was a good leader and his views on national defense were right, but the media interpreted it as racism as Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat in the 1940s. Of course Lott offered a lot of apologies and clarifications, but he lost his position and career because of it in spite of the apologies and whatnot. If that was a big deal, then I can't possibly see how Kerry's explicit comment isn't one too. I'm not calling for Kerry's ouster, only to have people think about how they react to comments like this and make it have some modicum of logic as to how the people that say them are treated. To quote Spock, the current system is just not logical. Phillip |
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