First thing’s first: The outrage is real. Anyone who believes otherwise can borrow my Inbox for a few minutes. The missives have come from California and Kandahar and just about everywhere in between. Military folks, both active and retired, are not at all amused by John Kerry’s flubbed “joke” or whatever he’s planning on calling it this news cycle.

Second thing: What Kerry said matters. A lot.

In order to grasp the significance of Kerry’s comments for him and his party, you need a little context. If you want some old history, you can go back to 1992 when the Democrats nominated as their standard-bearer a man who had previously confessed in writing to hating the American military. That man went on to become a two term president, and he used those two terms to alternately denude the military and use it as a laboratory for his social ideas.

If you want history that might be a little ancient, you can go back to the 1970’s when the Democratic Party did everything in its power to cripple the war effort in Vietnam. Meanwhile, on the home front, supporters of the 1970’s Democratic Party brought the term “baby killer” into the vernacular. Perhaps our present-day warriors should be happy that modern liberals are content with merely slandering them as “children.” Lord knows their predecessors were called a lot worse.

For some recent history, the Democrats in 2004 nominated another candidate for president whose history with the military was checkered. Even if we concede the highly dubious fact that John Kerry’s Vietnam service was marked by the greatest battlefield heroism since Achilles took one in the heel, his post-war testimony regarding the “atrocities” of the men he now prefers to call brothers in arms forever tarnished his record.

If neither recent nor distant history is your cup of tea, all you have to do is read the newspapers and blogs to get the strong suspicion that the Democratic Party and its abettors are lukewarm supporters of the war effort even if they repeat in a mantra-like fashion that they “support the troops.” Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of trolling the liberal blogs is seeing the virtually undisguised delight with which they greet every American setback in Afghanistan or Iraq. If politics once ended at the water’s edge, that is no longer the case.

AS REGARDS ALL OF THE PRECEDING, I really don’t wish to enter into a debate on any of it. If for instance you think bad news out of Iraq renders certain elements of the liberal blogosphere heartsick instead of sharing my view that it delights them since they are relentless political opportunists, we’ll have to agree to disagree. And if you think the Democratic Party has developed a sound relationship with the military over the past thirty years, then again we’ll just have to rest in disagreement.

The reason this Kerry thing has struck such a chord is because it reminds the electorate of certain facts concerning the modern Democratic Party. Even if John Kerry was making a dumb joke about the military, it’s a subject that his party and Kerry in particular just don’t have the credibility to jest about. If Robert Byrd began a joke by saying, “There’s a white boy, a Jew and an African American,” chances are his most loyal supporters would tear him away from the microphone and tell the crowd that it’s time for the Senator’s afternoon nap. The one-time Kleagle just can’t joke about such things. The same holds true for the Democrats, Kerry and the military.

I should acknowledge an awareness that some people, even conservative people, think Kerry’s boner was an attempted joke about the president that went terribly awry. While I don’t buy this contention and find it to be quite frankly ludicrous, even if we said for the sake of argument that this excuse is the 100% unvarnished truth, this event would still matter.

If Senator Kerry misspoke (as he claims) and in so doing caused great offense (which is undeniable), why can’t he just apologize? Furthermore, why are so many active Democrats so opposed to the notion of Kerry apologizing?

Again, the matter turns back to the Democrats’ disrespect for the military. That’s the lodestar of this affair. And I beseech you, please don’t offer me any rubbish about how Kerry served and others didn’t and thus his fidelity to the military is beyond questioning. Since his time in Vietnam, Kerry has spent four decades being perhaps the country’s most notorious and most unfair critic of the military. I have yet to speak to a single military person who considers John Kerry their champion.

THE WELLSTONE MEMORIAL in 2002 mattered because it revealed something fundamentally rotten with the Democratic Party. The party’s core had become ugly and vicious – the Wellstone memorial made that clear.

The Foley scandal mattered because it revealed a dark under-belly of the current Republican congress. Having lost its ideological moorings, some elements of the party had become more concerned with holding onto power than actually doing anything constructive with that power.

Lastly, the Kerry affair matters because it reveals fundamental truths about Kerry’s party. Both Kerry and his party remain arrogant and unserious, especially on matters concerning the military and national security. It sure was nice of the Senator to remind the public of these things a week before the elections.

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