Bush's willing enabler

The two most prominent presidential candidates offer stark differences in at least one significant way: style. President Bush is a messianic, self-righteous Crusader who makes a decision and never lets reality or the course of events force him to revisit his strategy. Modest tweaking, for him, is tantamount to unconditional surrender.Sen. Kerry is a more classic politician: always trying to have it both ways. This is a bad strategy for Kerry. Because the guy who stands for something, no matter how controversial or reckless, is usually going to beat the guy who stands for nothing. Politics abhors a vacuum.

On Iraq, Kerry claims he supported the war because he thought it was a good idea in principle (my suspicion: he was uncomfortable with it but thought it would be suicide for his presidential ambitions to oppose it). Now, he claims the president misled him and other legislators about it. This doesn't say much for his judgement.

Of course, he has to take this position. He agreed with his main opponent, the president, on Iraq so he needs to figure out some pretend difference to distinguish him from the president. Questioning what's going on in Iraq is no longer politically correct, or less than it once was, so he has to find a tricky balancing act. His answer, "Iraq was right, but done the wrong way." It's a stretch, because it was almost impossible that Iraq could've been done the right way. But he has to come up with something.

Kerry also voted for the Patriot Act, the centerpiece legislation in the war on civil liberties. But now he's blaming all the problems on Attorney General John Ashcroft. On his website, Kerry writes (in a piece ironically entitled, "George Bush's credibility problem":

You can sum up the problems with the Patriot Act in two words: John Ashcroft.

and

But, the real problem with the Patriot Act is not the law, but the abuse of the law. John Ashcroft has used police powers in secret ways and for political purposes - authorized his agents to monitor church meetings and political rallies without any cause and without the need to get approval.

This, more than anything else, shows that Kerry just doesn't get it. Sure, it's nice to demonize the attorney general (and not entirely inappropriate given the man in question), but this is a distraction designed to deflect Kerry's complicity in signing the blank check Mr. Ashcroft is exploiting.

If the attorney general can legally commit these abuses, then the problem is not just the attorney general. Any law whose fairness is put solely at the whim of one man is an inherently bad law. The whole point of our system is that people's lives and liberty should not be subject to the magnanimity of one man. Any law that does this, and thus ignores human nature, is so fundamentally rotten as to be irredeemable at its core.

Sen. Kerry signed a blank check giving the president carte blanche authority to conquer Iraq and the attorney general carte blanche authority to abuse civil liberties; now, he's whining about the logical consequences of his actions. Nothing can change the fact that he was complicit in both of these travesties.