I didn't realize that John Kerry had the authority to excommunicate people from Islam.

Maybe they are and maybe they aren't, but that isn't the call of the Secretary of State.

//At a conference of coalition members tasked with fighting ISIS in Rome yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry said members of the terrorist organization are not Muslims but apostates of Islam.

“Daesh [ISIS] is in fact nothing more than a mixture of killers, of kidnappers, of criminals, of thugs, of adventurers, of smugglers and thieves,” Kerry said. “And they are also above all apostates, people who have hijacked a great religion and lie about its real meaning and lie about its purpose and deceive people in order to fight for their purposes.”//

What was this idiot thinking?

Obviously, John Kerry wasn't thinking:

//There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.

And:

//When I first saw the key line here — “there was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale” — I thought that Kerry had likely been misquoted. Alas, he had not. In fact, his words are even worse in context. 

There really is no way of reading these comments other than as a craven ranking of outrages. Forget Kerry’s brief flirtation with the word “legitimacy” and assume that he said “rationale” from the start. That changes precisely nothing. The top diplomat in the United States just publicly argued that because the victims at Charlie Hebdo had spoken risqué words but the victims at the Bataclan had not, the violence against the former was more comprehensible than the violence against the latter. Has he lost his mind? 

Even if Kerry’s assumptions were all correct, the moral problem here would be obvious. We hear a great deal about “blaming the victim” in our domestic debates, especially as it relates to sexual assault. Does this not apply to other realms? In essence, the American Secretary of State just announced before the world that he could grasp why the woman in the short skirt was raped but that he had been left scratching his head by the attack on the woman in the pantsuit and the overcoat. “Sure,” he said, “I get why they knocked off the hate speakers, but why would they go after progressive kids at a concert? Now things are really serious.” 

In and of itself, this assessment is abhorrent. But he also screwed up the facts. Implicit in Kerry’s reasoning is the assumption that the perpetrators of the attacks against Charlie Hebdo had a clear purpose whereas the perpetrators of last week’s abomination did not. Or, as he put it, that in one case the killers were “really angry because of this and that,” but that in the other they were not. But this isn’t true. In fact, both set of attackers gave reasons. With Charlie Hebdo, the killers’ purported motive was revenge against ”blasphemous” expression; in Paris last week, it was disgust at Paris’s reputation for “obscenity.” In consequence, there are only two choices here: Option 1) That John Kerry believes that killing people for speaking rudely is more understandable than killing them for being secular; or Option 2) That John Kerry doesn’t actually know what the most recent attackers used as their justification (and also doesn’t remember that at the same time as the Charlie Hebdo assassinations, associated gunmen targeted a market simply because its owners were Jews). 
Despicable.//

So, all of the Arab world except Qatar and Turkey want Hamas overthrown?

Charles Krauthammer discusses how badly Secretary of State is blowing his job.

Don't any of these clowns have an Etiquette Secretary?

John Kerry shows insensitivity to mother of fallen Israeli soldier:

“How’s your day?” Kerry asked as he sat down. “How’s your day?” Evie asked back. “My day’s going better than yours,” he said.//

This guy could have been President.

Secretary of State's comment destroys American influence in "peace process."

In 2006, when Kerry insulted American soldiers, saying they were “stuck in Iraq” because they didn’t study hard enough, he just made a buffoon of himself. In 2010, when he registered his $7 million yacht in Rhode Island to dodge taxes, he just revealed himself as clueless. But that was when he was just a failed presidential candidate in the Senate. As secretary of state, he’s in a position to do more damage. Last year, when he accidentally gave Syria an out on its chemical weapons use, he handed off control of U.S. foreign policy to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who quickly brokered a deal that left dictator Bashar Assad in power. Kerry made Obama look weak, emboldened Putin and set the stage for the current Ukrainian crisis.//

I got your blooper reel right here.

John Kerry wants to talk about "blooper reels" on "overseas trips"?

Let's remember this classic bit of comedy called "the President accidentally miscues the band to play "God save the Queen" during his toast."


Lucille Ball couldn't have done it better.

Remember when 40% of America wanted this pimple to be Vice President?

Anne Althouse offers a retrospective on John Edwards.

Althouse makes an interesting point about Edwards' rhetorical use of a non-existent 10 year old to underscore his point about "Two Americas."

I embarked on that Google search as I was writing the previous post, disapproving of reasoning/arguing with empathetic anecdotes. I thought it might help you, as you steel yourself against the political rhetoric that comes in the form of anecdotes, to remember that disgraced prettyboy John Edwards and his 2-Americas mascot, the (nonexistent) coatless little girl.


I've been writing about the shortcomings of the human imagination as we get hung up on one thing — such as a person in the room pleading with us — and neglect to think about all the people who aren't here in our presence. But when politicians use anecdotes, they merely paint a picture for us to see in our minds, and the thing that we fail to see may be more real in the world than what's painted in that picture, such as Edwards's nonexistent coatless little girl.

There must be a little girl, you were supposed to think, because her story is specific. She's 10-years-old and I see her there, kneeling by the side of the bed, and it's a cold night.

You can see it — the unseeable nonentity — in your imagination. The anecdote-purveyor clogs up your head with phony pictures. Fight the fake little 10-year old that the ultra-fake politician would use to gum up the imaginative mechanisms of your mind. Feel the oiliness of the fakery as it lubricates those mechanisms, and visualize the things they'd prefer to be left unseen.

Verisimilitude and specifity are among the arrows in the liar's quiver.  Detail will make anything seem unchallengeable, and, therefore, truthful.

If you voted for Kerry-Edwards in 2004, read this and do penance.