I Am Very Tall

It's kind of interesting. For Al Gore, there's been a lot of wistfulness about what could have happened had he been elected president. I don't have the time or resourcefulness to go and look up a supporting article, but especially after the release of "An Inconvenient Truth," I think there were a lot of people who remembered that:

a) The election was more or less stolen from him
b) Had people overlooked his "wooden-ness," they might not have elected someone that thought it was acceptable to lie to the American people and then drag them into a war that's more or less Vietnam 2.0

Gore's post-movie success, I think, has a lot to do with him making a decision to essentially drop out of the limelight. He became a lecturer at Columbia for a bit, made a movie, and has repeatedly disavowed any intention of running for office. This apolitical stance has allowed him to work on what he thinks is important and say what he thinks is right, which has helped him immensely. Prior to Obamania, I'm fairly sure that a bunch of Dems were hoping that the guy would give up his guns and run for office.

Sadly, I don't think the same can be said for John Kerry. The guy just can't seem to get a break. Whereas people say that Gore had the election stolen from him, most people generally concede that Kerry ran a dumb campaign that essentially amounted to, "At least I'm not that idiot in office." Whereas Gore was stiff and wooden, Kerry just seemed to be kind of a loser (What the hell was up with that duck-hunting photo-op?). These days, anytime Kerry sticks his head out into public, it's basically just to have the door slammed in his face.

As evidence, witness his latest debacle with a botched joke. This is what he was supposed to say:

“Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.”

This is what he ended up saying:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”(1)

And there are others too. Sigh. Poor John Kerry.

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It makes me extremely happy to hear that people have taken all of the Republican sniping at John Kerry's expense more as a sign of the hypocrisy of the sniping party than as a sign of John Kerry being a bad person/bad joke giver/what have you. In particular, I liked what I read here and here.