What's worse, being stuck in Iraq or stuck on stupid?

We may have just witnessed the end of what was expected to be John Kerry's encore bid for the White House. Chances are the former Swift boat captain will not be reporting for duty as the Democratic nominee in two years. And for that, the country can be grateful.

How could someone with a fairly decent education who is speaking to students about the importance of education wind up saying something that sounded so uneducated?

What John Kerry said on Monday about how young people either ``study hard ... and make an effort to be smart'' or they ``get stuck in Iraq'' was totally lame -- and his excuses for why he said it were even lamer. Shelled by criticism from the right, the Massachusetts senator at first defiantly refused to apologize, insisting that it was the Bush administration that owed the country an apology for having a ``broken policy'' in Iraq and arguing that what he really meant was to insult Bush for not doing his homework when it comes to the war.

But none of that rang true. And when the criticism became bipartisan to the point where Democratic candidates started distancing themselves from him, Kerry tried to atone for a ``poorly stated joke'' with a poorly worded statement. In it, he expressed ``regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform'' and apologized ``to any service member, family member or American who was offended.''

That's terribly weak. Why do career politicians, on the rare occasions when they do apologize, always make it sound as if what they're sorry about is that someone took offense -- not that they said or did anything offensive? Career politicians such as Kerry have also perfected the knack of taking what could have been a one-day story and turning it into a three-part miniseries.

Instead of immediately admitting a mistake and begging for forgiveness, many of them go from insulting an individual or -- in Kerry's case, the U.S. military -- to insulting the rest of us by feeding up whoppers about what they really said, or what they really meant when they said what they said. Continued...