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The Kerry camp does itself no good by today’s overreaction to comments made by one the Swift Boat Vets, Jerry Corsi:
“President Bush should immediately condemn this sleazy book written by a virulent anti-Catholic bigot. It says something about the smear campaign against John Kerry that it has stooped to enlist a hatemonger,” said campaign spokesman Chad Clanton.
But the person Clanton refers to, Jerry Corsi, was clearly speaking with intentional hyperbole in the criticized comments, and is only one of the authors of the book.
Here are the comments in question:
But as he prepared to launch the book, “Unfit for Command,” Jerry Corsi apologized for the remarks in an interview with The Associated Press Tuesday, saying they were meant as a joke and he never intended to offend anyone.
In chat room entry last year on freerepublic.com, Corsi writes: “Islam is a peaceful religion just as long as the women are beaten, the boys buggered and the infidels are killed.”
In another entry, he says: “So this is what the last days of the Catholic Church are going to look like. Buggering boys undermines the moral base and the lawyers rip the gold off the Vatican altars. We may get one more Pope, when this senile one dies, but that’s probably about it.”
Corsi, who described himself as a “devout Catholic,” said the comments are being taken out of context. “I considered them a joke,” said Corsi, who owns a financial services company and has written extensively on the anti-war movement.
...”I don’t stand by any of those comments and I apologize if they offended anybody,” Corsi said.
By reacting in such a manner, the Kerry campaign is drawing far more attention to the Swift Boat Vets than they otherwise might have received, and is also involuntarily contributing to their believability. In the (slightly paraphrased) words of Shakespeare, “The [candidate] doth protest too much, methinks.”
The Kerry camp is surely familiar with these arguments, that they are shooting themselves in the foot by drawing attention to their critics in this way. The fact that they’re doing it anyway, suggests that they may be desperate and see no other course.
Update 8-14-04: It appears I was correct about the Kerry camp being desperate on this topic. See posts here and here at PoliPundit for links to others citing evidence of a Democratic “meltdown” over this.
