did John Kerry just call soldiers stupid?

[innerSpaceman]

If this is the line all the hubbub is about ...

Originally Posted by John Kerry

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.

... then, taken completely out of context, I have to honestly say I find the sentence to imply that people who don't do well in school join the military ... and yes, I find a correllary implication that most people in the military didn't do well in school.

Further, I think the logic exercise of finding the concept "all stupid people become soldiers" not equal to "all soldiers are stupid people" to be inapplicable to this situation. The vast majority of soldiers are people of a certain age ... school age, to be precise. Even assuming that a great many smart people, or rather those who do well in school, join the military ... I find it ludicrous to assume that such people are not in the extreme minority.


I am mindful, btw, that John Kerry served in the armed forces of the United States, and knows a bit more about the composition of those armed forces than do I .... or I daresay, most of the critics lambasting his remarks.


But unless the lead-in to that controversial sentence lays the blame for not doing well in school squarely at Bush's No-Child-Left-Behind program, I honestly don't see how Kerry was talking about Bush and not about soldiers.


And frankly, if Kerry does lay all blame for doing poorly in school on the NCLB program, I find that an absurd position. Much as I regard the program a dismal failure, I believe innate intelligence still to be the determining factor in how well one does in school ... no matter what weight is given to standardized tests.



I think Kerry said soldiers are dumb. But so what?