The World Wide Web is agog at Senator Kerry’s latest faux pas (to use a language he can understand). We invite our readers to go up on itshinesforall.com, one of the Sun’s Web blogs, and click on the link. Mr. Kerry, in an off-the-cuff remark delivered at a speech about education, said, “You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” Mr. Kerry’s remark was instantly recognized as an insult to America’s men and women on the ground in Iraq. They are part of an all-volunteer military and aren’t “stuck” anywhere. The American Legion and Senator McCain called on him to apologize.

Mr. Kerry claimed he had been trying to make a joke about the Bush administration, but he compounded his error at a press conference in Seattle yesterday, in which he said, “I’m sick and tired of a bunch of despicable Republicans who will not debate real policy, who won’t take responsibility for their own mistakes, standing up and trying to make other people the butt of those mistakes.” It was an odd forensic tactic because it only highlights how little his initial remark had to do with a real policy debate. This whole Kerry episode has called attention to how few ideas even the former Democratic presidential candidate actually has in respect of how to win in Iraq. “A Katrina foreign policy” is Mr. Kerry’s sobriquet for what he calls the administration’s “mistake upon mistake upon mistake.”

That seems like a more apt description for the Kerry electoral strategy. Voters have already seen through that once, including military voters. “What our troops deserve is a winning strategy,” Mr. Kerry said yesterday, “and what they deserve is leadership that is up to the sacrifice that they’re making.” He neglected to mention that those troops think they have just that kind of leadership already — polls suggest that more than 70% of the troops voted for Mr. Bush instead of for Mr. Kerry. Perhaps what those troops understood then is something that’s abundantly clear now: Mr. Kerry is a summer soldier. He and his colleagues don’t have any plan for victory in Iraq beyond ad hominem attacks on Mr. Bush and other Republicans.