Nowhere to flop

Krauthammer gets it right.

With Howard Dean rocketing toward the Democratic nomination, Kerry played to his deeply antiwar party by voting against the $87 billion to fund the occupation.

Two months later, with Saddam Hussein caught and the war looking better, Kerry maneuvered again, slamming Dean with: "Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don't have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president."

Kerry is now back to the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," a line lifted from Dean himself. So we are not better off with Hussein deposed after all.

These dizzying contradictions -- so glaring, so public, so frequent -- have gone beyond undermining anything Kerry can now say on Iraq. They have been transmuted into a character issue. When Kerry went off windsurfing during the Republican convention, Jay Leno noted that even Kerry's hobbies depend on wind direction. Kerry on the war has become an object not only of derision but of irreconcilable suspicion. What kind of man, aspiring to the presidency, does not know his own mind about the most serious issue of our time?

As Iraq suffers another horrific week of bloodshed, even the most stout-hearted supporter of the Iraq mission must be wondering whether we were mistaken in our belief--Iraqis, perhaps, are incapable of accepting Americans as liberators and friends.

And Democrats must be kicking themselves that Howard Dean isn't on the ticket.