Kerry's Apology, v. 2.0 and 3.0

Per TKS:

Kerry yesterday:

Let me make it crystal clear, as crystal clear as I know how: I apologize to no one for my criticism of the President and of his broken policy.

He didn't criticize the President or his "broken policy"; he criticized American soldiers. Specifically and caustically. He's refusing to apologize for something he did not, on this occasion, say, and thus also refusing to apologize for what he DID say by refusing to acknowledge that what he DID say is PRECISELY what he meant to say.

Kerry today:

As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop. I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended.

The standard "I misspoke" political CYA maneuver. Sorry, Senator, but that was not a "joke," and unequivocally DID refer to EVERY "troop". We did not "misinterpret" what you said, we LISTENED to what you said, and it sounded exactly like your many previous slanders of U.S. servicepeople.

You can tell the third version of his apology is crap because he followed it up with this:

It is clear the Republican Party would rather talk about anything but their failed security policy. I don't want my verbal slip to be a diversion from the real issues. I will continue to fight for a change of course to provide real security for our country, and a winning strategy for our troops.

If Lurch were genuinely remorseful, he'd have kept the politics out of it and said something as simple as this: "What I said was wrong. Period. I deeply apologize to all our men and women in the armed forces and hope they can find it in their hearts to forgive me for the grievous insult I inflicted on them. They truly are America's best, and I support them 100% in their difficult mission. I know they will, as Franklin Roosevelt once said, fight through to absolute victory."

Contrition and humility would have gone a long way toward fixing this breach that is rising up to sink another Democrat election cycle. But those are two character traits in awfully short supply on that side of the aisle - almost as scarce as Donk electoral victories. Which is why John Kerry is so comprehensively emblematic of the Democrat party.

UPDATE: Gotta love Mark Steyn's take:

If you talk to Democrats of the middle-class and upper-middle-class and (in John Heinz Kerry’s case) the neo-Gulf-emir-class, you’ll have heard the same thing a thousand times: these poor fellows in Iraq, they’re only there because they’re too poverty-stricken and ill-educated so they couldn’t become Senators and New York Times reporters and tenured Queer Studies professors like normal Americans do. That is, in fact, what they mean by the claim that they “support our troops”: they want to bring them home and retrain them so they’re not forced into taking jobs as Bush’s torturers and thugs. It’s part of the same condescension as describing soldiers as “our children”. If a 22-year old intern wants to drop to the Oval Office broadloom, she’s a grown woman exercising her freedom of choice. But, if a 28-year old guy wants to serve in Iraq, he’s a poor wee misguided Grade Six drop-out who doesn’t know any better.

John Kerry’s soundbite is interesting not because it’s the umpteenth self-inflicted wound by Mister Nuance but because it gets right to the heart of the Democrats’ “support” for the troops.

That's why this is a Wellstone funeral-magnitude bleep-up. It's so bad that I think Kerry would have been better off standing behind what he said than trying to bumblingly obfuscate it. As Trent Lott could have told him, all the Boston Balker's incompetent spinning has accomplished is to keep the story on the media front-burner, infuriate and motivate the Republican base to turn out in droves next Tuesday, and send every Democrat in a close race fleeing for the tall grass. It's not as if anybody believes his straw-grasping excuse-making anyway.

One insult to our intelligence was more than sufficient, Senator. Leave it to you to abuse yet another unmerited privilege.

UPDATE II: BTW, v. 3.0 of Kerry's "apology" was a statement on his Senate website. So the prick didn't even have the balls to go in front of cameras and a microphone and publicly say even that much.

Here's is what he did say in front of a microphone this morning - Don Imus', as it happens:

Incidentaly, when you say I have done something in the past I have told the truth in the past. I have never done anything except tell the truth. And I'm not going to take anybody's comment to suggest that somehow my telling the truth was a mistake. The American people rely on the truth, and when I came back from southeast Asia, I told the truth, and I am proud that I stood up and told the truth then, and I have told the truth about Iraq every single step along the way.

Except when he "misspeaks," which isn't really misspeaking because we poor knuckle-draggers are just too frakking stupid to help "misinterpreting" his more highly evolved mental byproducts. This is the what the intersection of Megalomania Avenue and and Psychosis Street looks like, folks.

Even Imus and his sidekick thought so:

McCORD: Somewhere Rosemary Woods is spinning in her grave, God bless her.

IMUS: Charles, I was saying "God, just just hand me the shovel and stop digging."

McCORD: He didn't have a shovel, he was at the controls of a backhoe. Stop it. I thought he said he was against torture.

IMUS: 24 to the hour here on Imus in the morning.

McCORD: That wasn't a tortured explanation. That was mutilation..

IMUS: You know, just, it is just a lot better to say exactly what you mean. And not try to be cute at it. For everybody. Rush Limbaugh, him. Everybody.

McCORD: He could end it now. He could have ended it then if had simply apologized for what could have been construed as at least an insensitive remark that could have affected morale, military morale. Just apologize for misspeaking and say this is what I meant to say.

IMUS: Well, he sort of said that.

McCORD: Sort of. But you couldn't get him to make that apology.

People generally don't apologize for things they do not regret. That's why Kerry's flailing attempts at damage control aren't convincing anybody. It's like breaking a finger and treating it by sawing off your arm. And then picking up your severed arm and beating yourself unconscious with it.

Talk about the gift that keeps on giving. Hopefully the RNC will send Lurch a nice "thank you" gift for all his well-timed help. Like a windsurf board with several pre-drilled holes to allow the water to run back out.

Might as well make it appropo....