Jay Nordlinger on Teresa Heinz. He's right. We are all hoping that we'll get to hear more from here as the campaign progresses.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Teresa Heinz Kerry is a piece of work. She's going to be a big story in the '04 campaign. She is a Martha Mitchell for our time. The press will have a field day with her, if they have the gumption to report what she says. Will they protect her? Or show her colors to the world? She may be hard to suppress.

Recently, some Bush administration official said that her husband, Sen. John Kerry, "looks French." The senator himself, of course, responded, "[This] means the White House has started the politics of personal destruction."

Oy (this will be relevant later). There is a perfectly good phrase — "the politics of personal destruction" — that has worn out its welcome. Because of inflation (or something). Now all the phrase means is, "Some Republican said something mean about me."

Anyway, the really beautiful stuff comes from Teresa. She said, "They [the Republicans] will probably say he's French, he's Jewish . . . he's a monkey. I just find it sad."

Whoa, whoa: Jewish? monkey? You mean, the GOP — my GOP — will attack Kerry for having a smidgeon of Jewish ancestry, somewhere (so he says — but wasn't he supposed to be Irish?)? The Democrats had an actual Jew on the ticket in 2000. I don't recall my party going all brownshirt on him.

And where did "monkey" come from? (I know: Darwin.)

But here's the kicker: Mrs. Heinz Kerry sniffed about the White House, "They probably don't even speak French."

How do you make the progression of insults from French to Jewish to ....a monkey. Is she implying a parallelism here? Is she implying that being called Jewish is today as insulting as being called French?