It was a quite stupid thing to say (though it turns out he was somewhat misquoted). There's no doubt about it. I don't know if you're familiar with the mocking that variants of the cliche "the lurkers support me in e-mail" brings in certain corners of e-mail, but Kerry invoked an international version. Stupid.

I'm not sure I buy that 'revision' of the quote. I think Glenn Reynolds' debunking of the revision seems a lot more plausible than Kerry's sudden realization he wasn't mentioning foreign leaders at all. I guess the silent majority is back.

President Bush would be a liar. The rules change somewhere to the moderate left of center.

Maybe the foreign leaders who supported Kerry vanished the same place those WMDs did ..

It's a dead end issue. It will do nothing for Bush and his campaign. In fact, if they harp on it too much, they will seem shrill. It reminds me of two siblings nit picking each other because they are tired, frustrated and irritated.

Rook,

Do you actually have any reason to believe that other than your own personal dislike of Bush?

Looking back, "Personally, I think Kerry's claim demonstrates how incredibly politically tone-deaf the man is" seems off-point. It's not as if he said this in a speech. It was a muttered point overheard by a journalist, said to a couple of guys, not even picked up by Kerry's own tape-recorder-handler.

If he had said it in a speech, yes, absolutely, it would have been stupid. As the bit of campaign mutter it was, it's nothing.