If you study, make an effort to be smart, apply yourself, you can have the best of what the nation offers. Hell, you can even be President. You can find yourself the punchline in a joke you don't like. You end up a mired monarch.
And if you don't apply yourself in school, if you fail to learn your history, don't admit there's a big disaster along your chosen path, if you skew the intelligence, ignore the facts, put personal gain ahead of what is right...you'll end up bogged down in Iraq. A mired Monarch, mired in the Iraq Occupation.
Well, duh.
All of the hew and cry about the immensely funny joke that Mr. Kerry made is misplaced.
Well, it's funnier if you actually get that the subject of the joke is the Mired Monarch, not the mired Marine.
Now, Sen. Kerry isn't blameless in the joke that caused a kerfuffle. This is not a time in this country where we are easily led to humor. We sort of lost that around the time of "Major combat operations have ended". It was downhill from there. 2700 combat deaths later, we're still not laughing. It's tough.
It's tougher when you're President, and you don't realize that the joke was, in bold letters even, about you. The military eventually do get out of Iraq. Sadly, too many of them arrive home under a flag, not wrapped in one.
If they are fortunate, our service men and women, our best and brightest youth, come home alive, relatively undamaged. If they are very lucky. And they are done. Maybe. Until the next foced call up.
Okay, they are stop-lossed into never ending service. But the real "not gettin' outta here" poster child is none other than George W. Bush.
Was it funny when there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction under the podium a couple of years ago? Not at all. But this President thought his failure to find what he knew wasn't there was funny enough for his own shtick.
Did I laugh? Well, ummm, yes. Gallows laughter, but I did laugh at the raised tablecloths and the distinct lack of DU explosives under the head table.
Why, there wasn't even a vial of ricin, or envelope of white powder at that dinner, although Sen. Leahy probably wasn't laughing after he sadly realized the anthrax mailing was in fact a threat/bribe, to ensure his vote for the Bill of Rights WMD, aka the Patriot Act.
That was, after all, the beginning of the Constitutional end of the Republic, brought to you by those that don't value the document or the nation's young that fight that Occupation, ostensibly for freedom, but really for ill-considered goals that seem to work only for war profiteers and torturers.
Did the audience get that Mr. Kerry wasn't insulting the troops? Well yes, I believe they did. If Mr. Kerry were truly insulting the troops, there would have been scant laughter. More than 100 troops have died this month, around 2700 since the flight deck declaration that we'd won. No joke in those facts at all.
President Bush can poke fun at himself, when he wants. But lately, we aren't about a little humor. Politics ain't beanbag, and death isn't funny. Being bogged down in a desert insurgency is even less funny than missing WMD.
More than that, we have an administration that cannot, will not, and won't allow others to consider facts. Those facts, if they'd been considered in 2002, might have kept us out of Iraq. But no, we get no true facts released. In fact we get silence. We get bogged down in silence as surely as you are bogged down in Iraq.
We need facts. We don't need silence about the reality in Iraq. More than 100 troops have died this month. Maybe more than that with the explosion of the ammo dump at Camp Falcon, that caused more than 300 to be taken to hospital, but resulted in no official release of any reports of injury, damage, deaths, or losses. Except of course there were 8 Iraqis that died at Camp Falcon, but nothing about any injuries. Nothing about the explosion whatsoever. These are facts that aren't suitable to jokes, but are suitable when evaluating just how bogged down Mr. Bush is in Iraq.
Camp Falcon really isn't about some joke either. It's deadly serious. Hours of exploding ordnance, and no US injuries or deaths. Just 300 sent to hospital. And silence. But that's not funny either. That's all a big secret.
What are they waiting for? November 8?
Well yes.
And so, we have Sen. Kerry finally finding that he needs to keep his day job. Jay Leno won't be calling him any time soon for a gig as comic of the week.
At the same time, one of the greatest failures of this Administration is a failure to recognize when facts must be faced. We get silence on Camp Falcon, and we need to know when something like Camp Falcon exploding happens.
We get no facts about the lack of medical care for the Iraqi citizens. We get offhand dismissal of the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study finding 655,000 dead Iraqis since major combat operations began. Probably more than 500,000 since major combat operations ended.
Yet we have silence. War, and occupation, aren't funny topics.
However, if it can't be spun to gain a vote, there will be no release of information. No possiblity of humor, good news, or even good political advantage in releasing even the facts for the American people to consider, as they should have considered true facts before the war. Those would be the facts about those, for example, absent WMD. Those would be the true numbers of coffins that arrive at Dover. Those would be the true facts about the leveling of Camp Falcon.
Mr. Bush would prefer the joke point toward another punch line. It does not. The real joke, if there is one, is on the President. Mr. Bush, you have recently signed laws authorizing torture. Your actions have made this nation bogged down in a war, or should I say "occupation", without end.
You got us bogged down in Iraq because you didn't want to face the facts that no matter how many tablecloths you lifted at that dinner before the Press Corps, you'd never find the WMD. Just as you'd never find the WMD in Iraq. Just as you'll never be able to change the pre-War facts to show that you failed to use your intellect, education and experience to the advantage of protecting the Constitution and the people of this nation.
No, rather than consider, or allow us, the people to consider the facts, you ignored the truth. The tough truths that pointed away from the war you wanted with every fiber of your being, Mr. President. You then shifted the cause for War. Then you made yourself the Monarch, suspending habeas corpus and allowing imposition of martial law on your whim.
Mr. Bush, we are mired in your war. We are mired in your campaign for dictatorship. We are mired in your bogged down battles for oil in Iraq.
Mr. Bush, you didn't get the joke. Mr. Bush, you likely won't ever get the joke.
And, your "Democrats just say no" when it comes to acting effectively and legally against plans to harm the nation, you are wrong there too.
"Just say NO" didn't work on drugs, as you well know. That is, until you finally understood the full meaning of the word "no".
"Democrats just say NO" doesn't work as an insult either. Democrats want to keep FISA, the Bill of Rights, freedom from martial law, and waste of the lives of our own best and brightest young, from the neverending plans you have for destruction. We, supporters of the Constitution wish, even pray ceaselessly, that you will eventually apply yoursef, face the facts, realize there is no victory possible on your terms in Iraq, just as you finally found no WMD at the banquet.
Mr. Bush, it's tough to be the punchline. The answer isn't to punch back. The response, the smart response, is to correct the basis for the joke in the first place. The best approach is to remove the cause for the joke in the first place.
The really smart response, in a democratic republic is to give up illusions of monarchy, dictatorial powers, and unconstitutional actions. The really smart thing would have been to have acted to prevent the joke being made.
The smartest response now would be to correct the errors. Now that would really make the joke fall flat.