there is so much depressing hard news out there that should be ignored, so that we can focus on something a little more entertaining to those on the right – bashing john kerry.

jonah goldberg:

Don’t let John Kerry run again.

Yes, yes, it’s true: I am biased. I have never been kind to the Brahmin Lurch. After his “botched” joke suggesting that American troops are uneducated losers, I wrote that Kerry “is an awful politician, a human toothache with the charisma of a 19th-century Oxford Latin tutor.” In response, countless readers wrote in to complain that I’d been unfair to Latin tutors.

But balancing out my personal animosity is my professional self-interest. As a conservative columnist, there is nothing I should want more than to see Kerry whack his forehead against the concrete wall of history one more time. Why? Because attacking Kerry is always good copy. And, if my North Star were the GOP’s good fortune, I would light a candle every night at my Lee Atwater shrine in prayer that the Kerry baloney leap once more into the grinder.

After all, he’s the most beatable of Democrats. His political instincts are duller than a prison-cafeteria spork. And never in my lifetime have we seen a presidential candidate with a more thumbless grasp of the way average Americans talk or live…

not bad. read it all here.

even better is the follow-up to that column by mark steyn:

I agree with Jonah’s column on the general ghastliness of the Botoxicated Brahmin, but it’s hard not to see that the Goldberg disparagers also have a point. If Kerry was so unlikeable, why was it so close? If Karl’s Rovebot laboratory had spent years constructing the perfect candidate to run against, it would have looked pretty much like John F Kerry – a vain thin-skinned self-regarding tone-deaf francophile insecure not-quite-blue-blood incoherent anti-war war-hero from a Swiss finishing school with nothing to show for 20 years in the Senate other than getting wrong every foreign policy question of the day and so alien to the habits of his electorate he’s unable to engage in as routine a photo op as eating a hot dog without looking like a Grand Duchess dropping in on the village idiot’s hovel.

ouch. because i know a few democrats (and actually like them), i hope for their sake that kerry gives up any idea that he has of running for president in ’08. it won’t be as close next time if kerry should surprise everybody(including me) and win the democratic nomination. i don’t think that the democrats have anything to worry about here, although i do see a leadership void with the current ’08 candidates that needs to be filled by somebody. who will it be?

tags: ’08 election, john kerry