Does Kerry respect American troops?

Because I saw this on The Kerry Spot before I had a chance to post it myself, I must give credit where credit is due. But the uproar surrounding the missing explosives story, and Kerry's response to it, highlight an important detail about his attitude toward the American military.

Thirty years ago, Kerry criticized American troops by stating that they had committed "war crimes . . . not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." He claimed that they had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war."

Thirty years later, he has a more polished manner of offering criticism, that comes from years as a politician. The substance remains the same, however. Now, he has said of the alleged weapons pilfering, "our country and our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics. This is one of the great blunders of the Bush policy in Iraq." And in his speech at Green Bay, he said, "Just as the Bush Administration’s failure to secure Iraq’s borders has led to thousands of terrorists flooding into the country, their failure to secure those explosives threatens American troops and the American people."

When Kerry speaks of the "Bush Administration" here, he is not talking about George W. Bush. He is actually talking about the troops on the ground in Iraq, and saying that they failed to do their job. For Kerry, old habits, like demeaning American troops, die hard.