There’s no one better at tearing apart the fatuous, murky pronouncements of John F. Kerry than P. J. O’Rourke: Kerry Loves the Mainstream Media.

Addressing the audience of tame Democrats, Kerry explained his defeat. “There has been,” he said, “a profound and negative change in the relationship of America’s media with the American people… . If 77 percent of the people who voted for George Bush on Election Day believed weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq—as they did—and 77 percent of the people who voted for him believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11—as they did—then something has happened in the way in which we are talking to each other and who is arbitrating the truth in American politics… . When fear is dominating the discussion and when there are false choices presented and there is no arbitrator, we have a problem.”

America is not doctrinaire. It’s hard for an American politician to come up with an ideological position that is permanently unforgivable. Henry Wallace never quite managed, or George Wallace either. But Kerry’s done it. American free speech needs to be submitted to arbitration because Americans aren’t smart enough to have a First Amendment, and you can tell this is so, because Americans weren’t smart enough to vote for John Kerry.

“We learned,” Kerry continued, “that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there’s a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

Kerry is hilariously bad as a demagogue. A low subculture and its inferior sub-media are thwarting the will of the sacred mainstream? His small sparks of malice were blurred by vast, damp clouds of Kerry-fog—murky budget critiques, hazy pronouncements on Social Security and health care, foreign policy vaporings, leaden anecdotes, and an obscure protest that 45 percent of West Virginians lack sewer hook-ups.