Liberal Talk Radio

John Kerry put his foot in it:

Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard and do your homework and you make an effort to be smart you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

But thankfully he’s not waffling.

Let me make it crystal clear, as crystal clear as I know how,” Kerry said. “I apologize to no one for my criticism of the President and his broken policy. If anyone owes our troops in the fields an apology, it is the president and his failed team.

GOP leaders are calling for Kerry’s head like it’s 2004 all over again, apparently, the truth hurts.

Many of today’s recruits are financially strapped, with nearly half coming from lower-middle-class to poor households, according to new Pentagon data based on Zip codes and census estimates of mean household income. Nearly two-thirds of Army recruits in 2004 came from counties in which median household income is below the U.S. median.

Or, from Slate:

Further evidence that the war in Iraq is wrecking the U.S. Army: Recruiters, having failed to meet their enlistment targets, are now being authorized to pursue high-school dropouts and (not to mince words) stupid people.

This year the Army set a goal of recruiting 80,000 active-duty soldiers, but it wound up with just 73,000—almost 10 percent short. As a result, the Army Times reported this week, the Pentagon has decided to make up the difference by expanding the pool—by letting up to 10 percent of new recruits be young men and women who have neither graduated high school nor earned a General Equivalency Diploma.

More than that, the Los Angeles Times reports today that 4 percent of recruits will be allowed to score as low as in the 16^th to 30^th percentile—a grouping known as “Category IV”—on the U.S. Armed Forces’ mental-aptitude exam.

Makes me wonder why the GOP is so terrified of having this info more widely disseminated. So terrified that party hacks the Heritage Foundation [in an article I won't link to because of Google considerations] actually went to the trouble of creating one of the most bogus “research” projects I’ve ever seen to refute this.

Anyway, inelegant though his comments were, at least Kerry didn’t back away from his own truth-telling.

P.S.  John Kerry — don’t lose us another election.  STFU!!!