DUMB AND DUMBER

Ask anybody who knows how to street fight, and they’ll tell you the most important thing is not to get mad. Lose your temper, act out of rage, and you lose your emotional intelligence, your capacity to think calmly and react quickly – so you get the crap beat out of you.

This is why Hollywood casting directors are proposing that actors Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels be replaced in the coming sequel to the 1994 movie Dumb & Dumber with… John Kerry and Dan Rather.

Oh, excuse the typo. It’s Dan Ra^ther.

No kidding, folks – the characters of Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne in Dumb & Dumber are Einsteins compared to Hanoi John and Frequency Dan. Let’s take Danny first. After the exposing of literally dozens of points of evidence that the Killian memos are forgeries, Danny looks eight million people in the eye on national television with this comeback:

“There is one document from May of 1972 which contains a normal ‘th’ at the top. To produce that in Microsoft Word, you would have to go out of your way to type the letters and then turn the ‘th’ setting off or back over them and type them again.”

Really? Here’s how easy it is to do. As any user of MS Word knows, the program automatically superscripts numbers like 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, etc. All you have to do to un-supercript them — 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th – is not type the “th” or “nd”, etc., right after the number but put a space between them with a touch of the space key. Then delete the space with a touch of the backspace key. That’s just what I did in this paragraph, which is being written in MS Word.

Alternatively, type the number automatically superscripted, say “4^th”, then click “Control-Z”, which un-superscripts it back to “4th”.

There are millions of people in Danny’s audience who use MS Word. It takes a stupidity far beyond that exhibited by Dumb & Dumber characters not to know that many of those millions would laugh louder at this pathetic ignorance of the world’s most popular word processing program than any antics of Jeff Daniels or Jim Carrey.

I’m writing this on Tuesday the 14th – sorry, 14^th. It’s most likely that by Friday when the TTP Weekly Report is emailed out, Rather will have capitulated – if only because the corporate suits won’t stand for his destroying the brand value of CBS News. That won’t be enough. Ra^thergate may end up with Danny being criminally indicted in a conspiracy with DNC officials to fraudulently manipulate a presidential election.

Now let’s move on to Hanoi John. Last Sunday, the KerryLied Rally took place on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. It was organized by my friend, Capt. Larry Bailey, and one of the speakers was my friend Jim Warner, a POW in North Vietnam for 5½ years. They are two of the most honorable men I am privileged to know.

It was great to see a number of friends there, such as Bob Brown, publisher of Soldier of Fortune Magazine, and TTPers Sally and John Vaci who had flown all the way from Birmingham, Alabama just to attend the rally. I enjoyed listening to the speakers, especially Jim, Unfit for Command author John O’Neill, and Steve Pitkin, who apologized to attendees for letting John Kerry coerce him into giving false testimony against American soldiers in Vietnam in 1971.

Yet I spent most of my time wandering around and looking at the people who were in the audience. There were about 3,000 of them – Rolling Thunder bikers, guys with huge handlebar mustaches and every inch of their arms implanted with tattoos; grandmas and grandpas; aged WWII and Korean War veterans; teenagers and kids in their 20s; plain regular folks of all ages you’d see on Main Streets across the country; and of course lots and lots of middle-aged men who had fought in Vietnam decades ago. They were all different and they had one thing in common.

These people were not there to root for George Bush. This was not a Republican rally. They were as many Zell Miller Democrats – maybe more – than Bush Republicans. The one thing that united them was their contempt for John Kerry and his betrayal of his country in 1971.

They have no contempt for Democrats in general – just this one Democrat in particular. How in the world, then, I kept asking myself as I strolled through the crowd, could the Democrat Party been so world-class stupid as to nominate a man such as John Kerry? A man with all negatives and no positives – no record of achievement in 19 years in the Senate, no firm principles, no integrity, immensely unlikeable, pretentious, condescending, and soporific? A man with a video-taped record of treason and betrayal of his fellow soldiers, a man guaranteed to open the psychological wounds suffered by the Vietnam Vets which hurt more than any physical wounds they endured and which have never healed to this day?

You could feel the pain of those wounds as you walked among the people at the KerryLied Rally. If you had any capacity for empathy, for sensing what other people are feeling, that pain hurt. It stabbed you in the heart, it hit you in the stomach, and made you cry – cry in sympathy for these noble, good, decent people who love their country and risked their lives for it, yet were dishonored, humiliated, and told to feel shame for fighting Communism in Vietnam.

The young people in the crowd were their children and grandchildren who grew up hearing accusations and taunts that their father or grandfather was a war criminal. Can you begin to imagine the hurt that John Kerry inflicted on all these people – hurt that to this very day he lacks the courage or character to apologize for?

One man stood in front of those thousands of people and did so. A short man in a blue blazer and tie who walked with a cane. Against the backdrop of a sunlit Capitol Dome rising behind him, Steve Pitkin explained to a suddenly very quiet crowd that he joined John Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War and participated in the “Winter Soldier Investigation” held in Detroit in February 1971.

Kerry told Pitkin that he had to testify about atrocities committed by American soldiers and Pitkin said he couldn’t because he had never seen or heard of any. Kerry got angry while the other VVAW members shouted and threatened him – so he agreed and lied in his testimony, which Kerry knew was a lie. Steve Pitkin stood in front of all these people and told them this, told them he was ashamed of what he had done, that he had carried that shame with him for a third of a century, that he had come here this day to apologize and to ask for their forgiveness. People cried, people cheered, and every single one of them forgave him.

When I met Steve Pitkin at a small reception after the rally, I shook his hand, looked him right in the eye, and told him, “What you did today took real courage. You have my thanks and my admiration.” He looked back at me with bottomless gratitude.

Steve Pitkin has a courage that John Kerry does not. All the people at that rally were eager to grant him forgiveness. They don’t want to hate. They want to forgive. They’re Christians, real ones. All John Kerry had to do at the start of his campaign – or even when the SwiftVet ads hit – is apologize like Steve Pitkin to his fellow veterans he betrayed. But John Kerry doesn’t have the character to do so. Nor the intelligence.

So the Democrats are stuck with the consequences of their rage and bitterness towards George W. Bush. If they had been smart, and not let their emotions turn their brains into mush, they would have nominated someone who could have given GW real competition, a decent man like Joe Lieberman. Just think of how different this entire presidential campaign would be if the Democrats had behaved like adults instead of children having a temper tantrum.

“He whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad,” sings the Greek chorus. Mad with rage, driven insanely stupid. The Democrats did not need any Greek gods, however. They have turned the Kerry campaign into a Deathwatch all by themselves.