{"id":1878,"date":"2004-03-16T16:13:37","date_gmt":"2004-03-16T21:13:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/16\/1878.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:45:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:45:24","slug":"ooh-what-he-said","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/16\/ooh-what-he-said\/","title":{"rendered":"Ooh, what he said…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ok, John Kerry said something stupid. Not as stupid as what Jessica Simpson said to Gale Norton<\/a>, but pretty damn stupid. If he said it<\/a>.\n

Anyway, he either actually said or implied that (a) he’d been talking to leaders in foreign nations about our elections, and that (b) he’d been told things in confidence, but would hint at them to a reporter.\n

I’m not sure whether I think it’s better if he’s lying. If he is, it’s just blather, and although it’s a stupid lie, it’s not the worst lie told by a presidential candidate this month. I’d rather Kerry said only useful, articulate things, and if he is going to lie, I’d rather that the lie helped him than hurt him. But as a lie, it’s not all that big a deal.\n

If, on the other hand, he is speaking loosely to foreign leaders, that’s a problem. I hold my candidate to a fairly high standard, and it seems to me that candidates or even potential candidates should not be holding those sorts of conversations. The only thing that is a sort-of saving grace is that he may well have meant leaders in<\/I> rather than leaders of<\/I> foreign countries; then it goes back to being a stupid thing to say, rather than a stupid thing to actually have done.\n

Finally, if somebody tells you something in confidence, you don’t talk about it. You just don’t. You don’t drop hints about it, and you surely don’t drop hints to reporters. Even if you are tired, and in a noisy airplane, and rambling beyond the normal bounds of sentence structure.\n

Digression: Have you Gentle Readers all seen The Candidate<\/a>? Do you remember the scene in the back of the limo, after the forty-’leventh time he’s been through his stump speech, when he starts just babbling the words? “We can no long, no, no longer, play off, black against old, young against poor. This country cannot house its houseless, feed its ... foodless. blahbuhblahbuhblahbluhblah.” I get a lot of sympathy for politicians misstatements, even Gov. Dean’s misquote of his own ‘confederate flag’ bit, off of that one scene. End Digression.\n

Step it up, Senator. You have clearly run a terrific campaign so far; we can tell because you won. I think I can speak for many many many of us when we say, with our teeth all gritted and stuff, “Please. Don’t. Fuck. Up.”\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ok, John Kerry said something stupid. Not as stupid as what Jessica Simpson said to Gale Norton, but pretty damn stupid. If he said it. Anyway, he either actually said or implied that (a) he\u2019d been talking to leaders in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1878"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16954,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions\/16954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}