Hitchens on Kerry

Oh, you know what I'm talking about!

On Wednesday evening, on Hugh Hewitt's high-octane radio show, I accepted his challenge and gave out my private email. I had said that my emails from soldiers in Iraq were generally relaxed about the Kerry flap: He wanted me to hear different.

I have since had the chance to read about 500 or 600 messages. Almost all of them politely phrased (I exempt one from "the Riordan family" who evidently have not forgiven the long history of British depredation in Ireland) and almost all of them appending the list of college degrees as well as of medals and citations held, these letters show a very deep and interesting rift in which Mr. Kerry plays only a secondary part. Many of my respondents agreed that his words may not have meant or intended quite what they first seemed to mean, but they also felt that the klutziness was Freudian, so to speak, in that the senator's patrician contempt for grunts and dogfaces was bound to come out sooner or later.

One thing I already knew is confirmed--there is a very great deal of class resentment in these United States. Another thing I wasn't so sure of is also confirmed--James Webb in Virginia is right to stress the huge rage felt by those of Scots-Irish provenance who feel that they have born the heat and burden of the day in America's wars, and been rewarded with disdain.

Check our the whole thing. If just for the reference to Kerry as "the fresh prince of Massachussettes".

Edited to add hat-tip to The New Editor.