Kerry Wasn’t Joking
The media seems to have taken John Kerry’s explanation that he “botched a joke” when he insulted the men and women of the US military. Kerry even went on to say that he would “never insult the military”. Well, his record shows he wasn’t joking when he made similar comments in 1972. He said the military “created a monster” in the form of violence-prone American soldiers and recounted that soldiers had “raped, cut of ears, cut of heads” of Vietnamese citizens and rampaging across Vietnamese villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan”.

Here is the important point: he also qualified these inflammatory comments by saying the acts “were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis”. He thus accused the general military of crimes of the few.

Or more recently When an elderly Democratic voter in the audience accused Vice President Dick Cheney of murdering women and children in Iraq in 2004, for the sake of oil profits, Kerry responded by saying, "I know exactly where you're coming from."

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that a military person would take those comments as an insult.
So obviously Kerry has, can and will insult our military.

As for the intelligence of the US military, during a Vietnam-era run for Congress three decades ago, John Kerry said he opposed a volunteer Army because it would be dominated by the underprivileged, be less accountable and be more prone to "the perpetuation of war crimes." "I am convinced a volunteer army would be an army of the poor and the black and the brown," Kerry wrote. Kerry made the observations in answers to a 1972 candidate questionnaire from a Massachusetts peace group which are very similar to his comments he made on Monday which he called a “botched joke”. There can be no doubt that John Kerry still believes the US military of 2006 is the same one of 1972.

At least John Kerry didn't insult every American's intelligence by trying to claim that he was joking (or "botched a joke" as it were) in 1972.

The 1972 questionnaire is available for all to read here: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/files/specials/interactives/wdc/documents/kerry_war.pdfJohn Kerry also wrote a book in 1971 titled “The New Soldier” which makes similar claims.