Man of the People

After Ted Barlow accused Jonah Goldberg of printing made-up stories of John Kerry pulling rank on ordinary citizens (often with the question, “Do you know who I am?,” which Jonah now abbreviates as “DYKWIA”), Howie Carr stoked the fire with a NY Post column detailing how his callers have been lighting up the phone lines for years with stories like this. (For those of you unfamiliar with his work, Carr is a Boston Herald columnist and radio show host who’s somewhere between the slightly over-the-top Limbaugh and Hannity and the way-over-the-top likes of Ann Coulter or Bob Grant). Now, Barlow does have a point about using anonymous letter-writers and callers to slam public figures, but I strongly suspect that some serious reportage would uncover a heck of a lot of people willing to repeat this type of thing on the record.
Now, Goldberg points us to an amusing catch by brand-new blogger Donald Crankshaw, who noticed a DYKWIA-type story about Kerry from none other than Dave Barry:

In conclusion, I want to extend my sincere best wishes to all of my opponents, Republican and Democrat, and to state that, in the unlikely event I am not elected, I will support whoever is, even if it is Sen. John Kerry, who once came, with his entourage, into a ski-rental shop in Ketchum, Idaho, where I was waiting patiently with my family to rent snowboards, and Sen. Kerry used one of his lackeys to flagrantly barge in line ahead of us and everybody else, as if he had some urgent senatorial need for a snowboard, like there was about to be an emergency meeting, out on the slopes, of the Joint Halfpipe Committee. I say it’s time for us, as a nation, to put this unpleasant incident behind us. I know that I, for one, have forgotten all about it. That is how fair and balanced I am.

You can check out Barry’s whole column here. While it’s Barry’s usual tongue-in-cheek style, Crankshaw says he emailed Barry’s “Research Department” and Barry insists that he’s not making this one up.
Meanwhile, the Onion perfectly captures Kerry’s true colors (link via Andrew Sullivan).