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Current Events » in reply to Hey! Looks like John Kerry has a great sense of humor too! Wauka Wauka Wauka!

Kerry's joke vs. Bush's joke
Mary Anne — (archived)

Kerry made a joke about the Secret Service assassinating VP Quayle.

OK, it was in bad taste.

Was Kerry in command of the Secret Service? No.

Had he ever been linked to an attempt to injure VP Quayle, or even egg his house? No.

Was anyone actually assassinated as a result of the subject of this joke? No.

Bush made a joke about not finding WMD.

OK, it was in bad taste.

Was Bush in command of the armed forces that invaded Iraq to find said WMD? Yes.

Did he have reason to doubt they were there? Maybe not: according to Clarke, reports he supervised and signed off on that had "the wrong answer" (interview on "60 Minutes") were turned away by the President's staff, so who knows what the President knew and when he knew it? (Someone has been studying the Watergate Hearings transcripts on plausible deniability.) A good case can be made for firing a lot of the President's staff, though.

Was anyone actually killed in combat as a result of the subject of this joke? Yes.

I was going to give this entire thing a pass because of the occasion of the bad jokes: a press event at which a sitting President is supposed to make fun of his Administration. That he didn't understand what was appropriate was sad, but not a surprise.

However, the defense mounted here based on a joke told by Kerry was too much to ignore. Kerry was driving a tractor mower; Bush was driving a tractor-trailer. The differences in scale and responsibility are something I had to address.

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