Kerry, In Hole Over Bad Joke, Kept on Digging

Listening to John Kerry on Don Imus's show yesterday brought back the horror of the bomb I laid on that radio program in 2000 when I inadvertently insulted the military.

As Kerry tried to explain his remark that only the uneducated get ``stuck in Iraq,'' he made his situation worse. Imus tried to save him from further damage, telling him: ``Stop talking. Go home, get on the bike. You're going to ruin this.''

Kerry wasn't to be stopped. In the blink of an eye, the campaign turf over two news cycles moved from whether Bush is properly commanding the troops to whether Kerry had insulted them.

Like Kerry's, my blunder lasted longer than it needed to, but after a few of the 700 e-mails I would eventually receive hit my inbox, I knew I had to ask Imus to let me revisit the scene of my crime immediately.

The Massachusetts senator preferred to hunker down behind the ``botched joke'' defense, suffering through an entire day of cable news playing Kerry's Funniest Home Videos, so well-known that there's no need to recount them here. He had his office distribute the remarks as he meant to deliver them (the undereducated Bush got ``us'' stuck in Iraq, he was supposed to say).

Bad jokes are what happen to stiff, elite stumblebums with neither comic timing nor a sense of self-deprecation. Jokes about Bush's IQ are no longer amusing, especially if the punch line is the war. Doesn't Kerry have a wife or staffer who can tell him such things?

Read the whole column here.