Sen. John Kerry: ‘I Apologize to No One’

 Sen. John Kerry: ‘I Apologize to No One’

NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2006 4:08 p.m. EST

Sen. John Kerry has refused to apologize for his remarks suggesting that U.S. troops in Iraq are uneducated and not “smart,” instead charging that the White House has deliberately misconstrued his comments.

At a Tuesday afternoon press conference in Seattle, Kerry said “I apologize to no one” for what he categorized as criticism of the Bush administration’s Iraq war policy.

Kerry touched off a storm of protest when he told a college audience on Monday that “if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

The comments drew demands for an apology from Sen. John McCain, the National Commander of The American Legion, and others. White House press secretary Tony Snow called Kerry’s statement “an absolute insult.”

But at his press conference, Kerry tried to give his remarks a tortuous spin, saying in effect that what he meant was if you’re like President Bush and you don’t do your homework – listen to advice from others – before committing American troops, “you end up in Iraq.”

He also claimed that the White House understood what he was trying to say yet sought to “distort” his comments.

As NewsMax reported earlier, 99.9 percent of the enlisted forces have at least a high school education, and 73.3 percent have been to college.

Among commanders:

Gen. Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, has an MBA from George Washington University and has taken courses at Harvard.

Gen. John Abizaid, Commander of U.S. Central Command, has a master’s degree from Harvard.

Gen. George Casey, Vice Chief of Staff in the U.S. Army, has a master’s degree from the University of Denver.

Brigadier Gen. Mark T. Kimmitt, U.S. Central Command’s deputy director for strategy and plans, has earned degrees from the United States Military Academy, Harvard, the National Defense University, and the United States Army Command and General Staff College.It bears noting that our commander in chief, President George W. Bush, who has earned degrees from Yale University and Harvard University, is the only U.S. president to have earned an MBA. He’s also proved himself “smart enough” to defeat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

Enough Apologies

Excellent observations from Anne Applebaum in, of all places, the Washington Post (thanks to Jeffrey Imm):

…we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech — surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts — and of the press. And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns. By “we” I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News — Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between. True, these principles sound pretty elementary — “we’re pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence” — but in the days since the pope’s sermon, I don’t feel that I’ve heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it’s time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to “hate” Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn’t the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain’s chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them — simultaneously?

CAIR, eh? Once again: don’t hold your breath, Anne.