The Kerry campaign flamed out again yesterday after pictures showing John Kerry looking, well, geeky were released by NASA after a Kerry visit to one of their facilities. The blogosphere pounced on the photographs — one of them will likely be our Caption Contest photo this week — and the Kerry/Edwards campaign went into full offense, trying desperately to keep the comparisons of Michael Dukakis and tank-riding out of the public consciousness. This effort led Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry’s campaign manager, to tell Fox’s Brit Hume that Kerry had been set up — by NASA!
HUME: i must ask you about this photograph that suddenly turned up and fell in our laps last night nobody thought it was come. nobody had reported on the event which led to-t but there he was, the senator, on all fours in this very peculiar outfit, which i guess nasa had given him. how did that come about?
CAHILL: well, yesterday senator john glenn, obviously he was an astronaut in his previous life sexrvings senator carr took a tour of a bio facility at nasa. it was just the two of them, and the nasa staff, and all of a sudden this is a leaked photo.
HUME: it was leaked?
CAHILL: yes.
HUME: it was made by nasa, right?
CAHILL: yes, it was.
HUME: so the campaign had no idea there would be any photographs.
CAHILL: none.
No idea that they took any photographs?
None at all?
Perhaps this was just a meeting to discuss rocket science. Too bad they were all smiling into that hidden camera, including those long-time Republican operatives, Senators Bob Graham and Bill Nelson (D-FL) and former Senator John Glenn (first on left, hat tips Leather Penguin and Dr. A. Mark Gambee):
The Left likes to talk about how paranoid Nixon was, but these days Nixon almost seems like Pollyanna compared to the Democrats. According to Mary Beth Cahill, John Kerry is so stupid that he doesn’t realize that when someone points a camera at him and asks him to smile, he doesn’t know they’re taking a photograph, even when the flash goes off, and even when he’s asked to pose with three other Democratic politicians. Is that what Cahill wants us to believe?
Or, perhaps, it’s more likely that John Kerry and his campaign continue to blame his own missteps on others. He didn’t fall, that son-of-a-bitch pushed him. They weren’t his medals, they were Some Other Guy’s, and besides they were ribbons, which mean the same thing as medals, except when they don’t. He didn’t vote for war, Bush misled him into voting for the war. He voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it. He didn’t smile, those NASA bastards used a camera to fool him into thinking that his visit was a secret.
If Kerry isn’t man enough to take responsibility for his own actions, why should anyone vote to give him responsibility for leading and protecting the free world?
UPDATE: Noted all of the people in the final picture, thanks to IDs from Leather Penguin and reader Dr. Gambee.