Democrat presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry launches an X-rated attack on President Bush over Iraq and uses the F-word in a new interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
Kerry uses the expletive to describe his frustration over how his decision to back the president’s resolution to go to war in Iraq has hurt his candidacy while Democrat front-runner Howard Dean is breaking ahead of the pack due in part to his opposition to the war.
”I voted for what I thought was best for the country. Did I expect Howard Dean to go off to the left and say, ‘I’m against everything’? Sure. Did I expect George Bush to f – – – it up as badly as he did? I don’t think anybody did,” Kerry told the magazine.
Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution presidential scholar, says he can’t recall another candidate attacking a president by using foul language in a public interview, according to the New York Post.
”It’s so unnecessary,” Hess told the paper. ”In a way it’s a kind of pandering [by Kerry] to a group he sees as hip . . . I think John Kerry is going to regret saying this.”
Rolling Stone spokesman David Wade told the Post Kerry was accurately quoted in the interview and the language used by the candidate is simply a reflection of the fact that Bush’s Iraq policy ”makes John Kerry’s blood boil.”
According to the paper, when asked yesterday by a New Hampshire student whether it’s unpatriotic to attack the commander-in-chief, Kerry angrily cited his war record in Vietnam and fumed:
“I left some blood on a battlefield that President Bush never left anywhere.”
