Reply #5: Kerry Would Have Run Out of Money [View All]

…southerners are characterized, particularly southern males, by what’s called by anthropologists a “culture of honor”, where if someone dishonors you, if someone speaks to your face ill of you and you don’t respond, you’ve been shamed. And you know, 200 years ago that would have lead to a duel. And here is this man who is a war veteran, he’s being run against with a story that he’s going to be weak on terrorism, he's going to be weak on national defense. Someone punches him. What does he do? He says nothing. He waits three weeks and then he sends his female campaign manager out to write a letter to the campaign manager of Bush, imploring him, ‘Please take it down’. Boy, if you want to send a meta-message about what you’ll do if America’s attacked, he sure sent a powerful meta-message, and he could have done it very differently. . . At that particular point, I would have suggested that Kerry get right out on television immediately and say, “President Bush, for you, a man who dodged the draft, who did nothing but protect the borders of Louisiana, while being a staunch advocate of the Vietnam War, who called your daddy up and said ‘get me out of this!’ when you got the call, ‘please, send some Texas millworker in my place to get shot at’, and who managed to pull those strings, for you to say to me, a war veteran with the shrapnel still in my leg, that I don’t deserve the Purple Hearts that I earned and to put on a campaign ad like that that shows that I don’t deserve my Purple Hearts! Every veteran in the United States, you have just affronted. What you’ve done . . . and, and to do this in the middle of a war when we have boots on the ground, what do you think this says to our soldiers in Iraq or in Afghanistan who are fighting bravely, who are taking bullets right now, that someone someday is going to come back and make fun of their Purple Hearts? How can you have the moral authority now to be the commander-in-chief?”