John Kerry: And why did I vote for you again? Oh yeah, you were running against that hillbilly cokehead

Usually, when someone refers to that whacko Senator from the land of crab cakes and Red Sox, Ted Kennedy's giant head pops up in my mind. Thanks to John Kerry's recent comments about the importance of education in avoiding ending up in Iraq, Kennedy will be in good company. Kerry has played it off like it was a bad joke to say that if you don't do well in school, you'll end up in Iraq, but Republicans, lacking perspective, have been jumping on this hoping to bolster their position in the polls.

The actual impact that this will have one week before a hotly contested election is debatable. Kerry is not up for election this cycle, and even if he were, the stellar incumbancy rate in Congress (sitting at well over 90% historically) will assure him of another term in the Senate. Also, Democrats who are up for election have effectively distanced themselves from his comments.

Even so, Republicans are grasping for straws if they think that Kerry's comments will outshine 6 years of less than stellar performance from Republicans, who've run everything except the Congressional Cafeteria in Washington for the last 6 years. Kerry's comments are both dumb and insensitive, but so is sending our troops to Iraq without adequate armor. It wasn't like he was sexaully harassing interns, inventing intelligence to support the invasion of Iraq, taking bribes for political favors, revealing the identity of a undercover CIA operative and compromising the lives of all of her contacts, or making gay marriage and flag burning the key domestic action items while 10 million kids in the US don't have health insurance. Nope, that's not what John Kerry was doing. That's what Republicans were doing or not doing, I suppose.

The best part is that Republicans can't hang any of that on the Democrats. The Republicans wanted to have complete control, and they demonstrated what they could accomplish when they ran all 3 branches of government. It's a compelling arguement to vote for Democrats, even if John Kerry should shut his big fat mouth.