[Dean's World] Ron Coleman: And they both did better than I did

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Posted by Ron Coleman:
And they both did better than I did
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1162426300.shtml


   [1]Jonah Goldberg makes a point that, well, I hadn't missed, even for
   a solid 3.0 student like me is:

     If it was a joke, it was a pretty bad one, even for him. First,
     Bush got better grades than Kerry at Yale. More relevant, if
     launching the Iraq war is a sign of stupidity and a failure to do
     oneâs homework, Kerry should avoid calling attention to the fact
     that he voted to approve it and defended that vote throughout his
     2004 presidential campaign.

   Well, that's only because he campaigned for it before he campaigned
   against it.

   In my "Voting Republican" post, I purposely avoided the John Kerry
   topic, because for me it opens up a whole new category of political
   contempt. (I hear he's a nice guy, personally, and I'm counting on his
   vote when I'm nominated to be Ambassador to the Court of St. James.)
   It's not because he's a liberal Democrat, believe me. Why, he is not
   half the statesman Walter Mondale was, for example, or the
   pre-shock-therapy Al Gore. John Kerry epitomizes, for me, the
   politician who will say absolutely anything, and absultely nothing, in
   order to get and stay elected; in so doing he makes Senator Clinton
   (who if you follow me on this blog I am getting increasingly soft on)
   seem the very emblem of plain speaking.

   The fact is that, by all the evidence, more and more Democrats realize
   this -- today, more than ever -- too. Yet I know almost no one who
   voted for him in the 2004 election who will admit what it patently
   obvious: That no matter what they think of George W. Bush, John Kerry
   as President would have been a disaster.

   And its that immense gap of conceptualization (for those same people
   see me as equally insane even to suggest that President Bush is
   competent to lead, much less meritorious) that bothers me quite a bit,
   until I recognize that there were and are people who thought FDR was
   basically a Stalinist, Truman a mental defective, Eisenhower a
   carnival geek, up through Clinton as a traitor who launched cruise
   missiles to distract from his personal domestic embarrassments and who
   really did not care about terrorism. None of these things was true,
   but look what politics does do our discourse; still, knowing that it
   almost always has done it perhaps provides some comfort.

   At least to those of us in the solid academic middle.

References

   1. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTExMDk5NmI5ZjlhZGE1N2YyNjliY2YwNGUwODAyMjU=