Jackin Off John

The New York Times in in Full On jerking off mood today, masterbating John Kerry like there is no tomorrow.

Like a caged hamster, Senator John Kerry is restless on the road. He pokes at the perimeter of the campaign bubble that envelops him, constantly trying to break out for a walk around the block, a restaurant dinner, the latest movie.

Yeah, a caged hamster. Right.

He is a relentless polisher, going over and over even well-worn sections of his stump speech until moments before delivery.

Noted.

At 60, Mr. Kerry is an avid and able athlete, though he sometimes seems physically awkward, with custom-made clothes hanging off his lanky frame as he pumps a fist at rallies. A former prosecutor, he employs a Socratic style in policy talks with aides and advisers, though he rarely goes beyond chitchat in conversations that could be caught on camera.

His formal statements are filled with multisyllabic upper-crust phrasing; his campaign had an intern whose main responsibility was to look up all the unfamiliar words Mr. Kerry uttered; but one on one, he calls strangers "man" or "brother." He is careful to use people's names; he has interrupted himself more than once to introduce sign-language interpretations; yet he rarely remembers them.

And where former President Bill Clinton plays cards and President Bush turns to the treadmill, Senator Kerry strums his Spanish classical guitar in a kind of musical meditation. Lately, in the private front cabin of his campaign plane, he has been learning a new (old) song, "This Land Is Your Land."

"He's a weird mix of both the very refined taste of elite schools and all that but also eating Hostess cupcakes and watching dumb comedies on TV," observed Andrei Cherny, who spent more than a year as Mr. Kerry's chief speechwriter and now works for the Democratic National Committee. "It's sort of a mix of those two things: Up on pop culture more than most people running for president; at the same time, he's read all these books by people whose names I can't pronounce."

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who has both relaxed with Mr. Kerry on the beaches of Cape Cod and campaigned with him in a working friendship spanning 30 years, said, "An awful lot of what appears to be standoffish is a sort of shyness in him."

Mr. Kerry is anything but simple and straightforward, a man of many sides and surprises, some seemingly contradictory.

I understand. Yes, I see it all now. Jodi Wilgoren must have swallowed buckets of Mr. Kerry's special campaign sauce to buy into this crap so completely.

Bust from the album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below by OutKast & Killer Mike

Paradise City from the album Greatest Hits by Guns N' Roses

Good Grief from the album Foo Fighters by Foo Fighters