A (tall) pretzel of asininity.(John Kerry)

ENTRENCHED somewhere in Boston's biotech corridor there must be a newfangled Wonka Works dedicated to growing enormous liberal doofuses in a petri dish, or may be a strawberry patch. And every now and then the Oompa-Loompas roll out something that looks like Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, or the Augustus Gloop of American liberalism, Ted Kennedy.

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John Kerry bent himself into a pretzel of asininity when he was criticized for telling a crowd of students that if they didn't study hard, do their homework, and get smart, they'd end up "stuck in Iraq." No doubt the debate over his intent--"tactless, haughty crap-weasel makes idiotic joke about Bush and sounds like he's insulting the troops" versus "tactless, haughty crap-weasel actually does insult the troops"--will seem stale beer before long. But even if Kerry is being honest when he says he didn't mean to insult the troops (which is plausible), what he fails to understand is that it's an entirely reasonable mistake to think that he did mean to. Because when John Kerry seemed to insult the troops, he sounded like John Kerry.

Kerry's rage at being "swiftboated" never takes into account the possibility that there was merit in the swiftboating. It's all Rovian distortions, he says. But he is the living embodiment of Vietnam Syndrome, a malady that has paralyzed much of the Democratic party for going on 40 years now. He has made a career by speaking in the cadences of anti-Vietnam protest--if "cadences" isn't too fancy a word for the rhetoric of one of America's worst public speakers. He didn't become a senator because ...