So, unless you've been living under a rock, you know by now that a little while ago, former presidential hopeful (some people who are not me would say "former presidential winner") John Kerry commited what might generously be described as a bit of a faux-pas by superhero Incredible Understatement Man. Basically, thanks to a missing word, Kerry answered the long-standing question: Given all the hot water the Republicans have been in over the past month, what will the Democrats do to blow this oppertunity?

What he said was:

Education, if you make the most of it, 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.

What he meant to say was:

Education, if you make the most of it, 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 us stuck in Iraq.

Now look, I think it's pretty obvious that Vietnam Veteran John Kerry did not actually mean to insult our troops. Aside from the fact that doing such a thing is rather counter to the man's general political views, it would be such a ridiculously dumb thing to do that there's no concievable political advantage in doing it. Even if you did believe it, no one with any political saavy at all would get up and say "That Hitler chap had some nice ideas," because there is no way that saying this would help your political carreer (Well, okay, there are probably some isolated communities where calling someone a "Macaca" would actually win you votes). This is why politicans lie so much -- because if they got up and said what they really thought, no one would elect them. And, again, that's if he actually thought that our troops were dumb. Which he doesn't.

This is part of a concept we cynical folks call "Hanlon's Razor": Never attribute to malice what could be equally well explained by stupidity.

Now, Fred Clark, one of the most reasonable and levelheaded thinkers in the blogosphere says that Kerry's intention was perfectly clear and that anyone who claims otherwise is being dishonest to score political points. Well, I agree at the end of the sentence, and disagree at the beginning. I do think it's obvious that Kerry wasn't trying to call our troops stupid, and I think that's obvious, and I think that the people saying otherwise break down into the usual two groups: liars and dupes-of-the-liars.

What I disagree with is that it was in any way obvious what he was trying to say. Those little words are important, and it wasn't until I heard the "corrected" (or "retconned") version of the quote that I understood how what he said could have been meant as a direct insult to the administration.

Those of you who aren't comfortable with shades of gray will no doubt be saying at this point: "But how could you think he wasn't insulting our troops if you didn't see how he could be insulting the administration? It's got to be one or the other!"

As usual, it doesn't, and that is the lie that the pundits are selling America: that if you don't buy that he was slamming the administration, he was obviously slamming the troops (Of course, the perrenial lie of this group of pundits is that the two are one in the same, which makes for some interesting metaphysics)

In fact, what it sounded for all the world like to me, this quote in its original form, was a morally neutral warning that was bizarre in that it was being delivered in the mid twenty-aughts rather than in the late ninteen-sixties. What it sounded like, to me, was a line out of Hearts in Atlantis (The book, not the movie. I haven't seen the movie, but as I understand it, whatever its merits, it only covers about a quarter of what's in the book; the book Hearts in Atlantis is an anthology of linked stories. The film is based on the first story, "Low Men in Yellow Coats", about a guy who can read people's minds. The actual story "Hearts in Atlantis" is about a bunch of college kids during the Vietnam war, who become obsessed with playing a card game amid the social upheavals of the period. Well, okay, it's about a lot more than that, but I'm already way off track. The salient point for this discussion is that the protagonist is in college, and he spends so much of his time playing hearts that his grades are suffering). Our hero comes home for some holiday, and his grades are bad enough that falling out of college is a real possibility, and his brain-injured father channels Forrest Gump to drop on him this little bit of wisdom (Heavily paraphrased on account of my copy of Hearts in Atlantis is not ready to hand): "Boys who don't do well in their studies are dying in Vietnam."

That's what Kerry's comment sounded like to me. Not an insult, not "If you're stupid, you join the army", but a very direct warning: "If you get thrown out of college, you will be drafted." Let's face it, getting drafted can't be much fun. I think most people would agree that one of the things most praiseworthy about our troops today is that they all chose to serve our country.

And that's what made the whole thing seem surreal to me. Because people aren't getting drafted, and they did away with college deferrals anyway.

"But," one of you says (you know who you are), "That's just a silly thing for it to mean. Why didn't you reject that interpretation out of hand and assume he was insulting our troops instead?"

Well, obviously, I did reject that interpretation. It didn't make sense in context. Neither does the suggestion that Kerry wanted to call American troops stupid. But this was enough to convince me that what he meant was not in any way obvious from what he said. And I find it troubling that the folks in power are advocating this (with apologies to the many fine people in a certain Baltimore suburb) "Dundalk attitude" that looks, desperately, for any possible derrogatory meaning in a vague sentence, then assumes it's true, because they like the idea of kicking your ass for talking shit about their momma.

Because if you don't pay attention to Hanlon's Razor, someone's going to get cut.