“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

The GOP is trying to avert some attention away from their multiple scandals and massive mismanagement by trying to turn the spotlight on Kerry. the above remark was included in a session where Kerry was joking about how bad things are under the Bush administration.

Actually, Kerry mangled the line. According to his script, he was supposed to say, “I can’t overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq.” In other words, it was supposed to refer to Bush himself, not the troops.

But Kerry did mangle the line–it came out as something else. But let’s consider for the moment as if Kerry had actually intended to say what he said.

The criticism is that, the GOP is claiming, Kerry was essentially saying “all soldiers are stupid.” Which, of course, is an intentional misreading of even the misstatement, for maximum negative play. And once again, the GOP is using the honor of the soldiers as cover for their own sorry political asses–as if Republicans weren’t knifing soldiers in the back while using them as political props.

The fact is, in “you get stuck in Iraq,” the “you” does not even apply to soldiers: it applies to Bush. Bush gets stuck in Iraq. But hey, let’s run with what the conservatives have played the line into, and assume Kerry was talking about the troops.

It is fact that the military is discarding virtually all qualifications for recruiting, and that they commonly target people who have no good options after they graduate from high school; it is similarly accepted that if you have no good options, the military might be one of the only ways out for you. None of this means “all soldiers are stupid,” nor does it even mean that people who fail in school are poor soldiers–the military trains you well, and gives you ample motivation to become a lot more than what you were. The “uneducated” part applies only before the military trains you, not to active soldiers in the field, which is what the GOP is hoping to play this into.

So, the conservative misreading of what Kerry was misspeaking in jest was about having so few options that the military–previously a good alternative–is now a terrible one because you’re likely to be jammed into the streets of Baghdad. And if that were such an attractive option, then why are so few MIT and Harvard grads signing up for duty?

What Kerry is made out to have said has real applications in practice–and the irony is, it’s because of Bush’s stretching the military beyond its limits that this is true.

The Republicans are excellent at taking remarks out of context and vilifying them. Look at Al Gore’s “inventing the Internet” comment. He never said that, but did that stop conservatives? The guys credited for actually inventing the Internet said Gore’s statement was accurate, and he deserves lots of credit. Gore’s political contributions were in a large part even responsible for the multi-trillion-dollar Internet boom of the 90’s; Republicans rewarded his efforts by taking a single statement, misquoting it, re-interpreting it, and then ridiculing him for it.

And if the Republicans have to take an intentional misinterpretation of an unintended misstatement by someone who’s not running for office nor is a party leader, in order to try to smear the whole party in an election, you know they’re low on ammo. That the press is running with this non-story (damn that liberal media!) is simply testament to their attraction to flash and not substance.

Short version: Kerry was right, in every interpretation of what he said. Doing poorly in school can leave you fewer options, one of the least favorable is to get sucked into the Iraq conflict. If that offends conservatives, they should consider why it is true.