A (tall) pretzel of asininity.

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.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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 of his service in Vietnam; he became a senator because he attacked service in Vietnam, and those who served. That's why vets overwhelmingly rejected the faux pomp and circumstance of his 2004 campaign.

Even if that campaign hadn't been an absolute fluke (Kerry's nomination depended entirely on Howard Dean's suddenly imploding and Democrats' convincing themselves that a lifelong dove is as good as a hawk if he served in the military), Vietnam would still be the only important event or accomplishment in Kerry's otherwise blah career. He has no other prism to look through, no other lexicon to borrow from. People couldn't tell whether he was joking about Iraq because he has spent his whole public life recycling the same tired anti-Vietnam lines (which were dishonest then and are doubly so now). But Kerry is so lacking in self-awareness that he thinks he's being smeared. His reaction should have been the one most of us have when we hear our recorded voice: "Oh my gosh--I sound like that?"

The leadership of Kerry's entire party sounds like that. The Democrats haven't had a foreign policy since Vietnam, and liberalism hasn't found a post-Vietnam politics generally--which is why Michael Dukakis did his Beetle Bailey impersonation on that M1 Abrams, and why Ted Kennedy dusts off the "quagmire" speech every time a tank rolls off the gangplank. Here's the secret they're missing: Liberalism's performance during the Vietnam War is no longer considered something to brag about. It's time for the Oompa-Loompas to roll out something new.