Salon.com: In desperation, John Kerry goes too far

[Larkspur]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/12/18/kerry/index.html

Desperation isn't pretty, and Sen. John Kerry is looking increasingly desperate as he tries to stop the juggernaut candidacy of front-runner Howard Dean. On Wednesday, though, Kerry crossed a line, falsely accusing Dean of saying the U.S. needed to ask "permission" from the U.N. and the rest of the world before going to war to defend itself.

Dean never said any such thing. In his Monday foreign policy speech, which drew a bright media spotlight because it came on the heels of the capture of Saddam Hussein, Dean said he'd have gone to war with Iraq "had the U.N. given us permission." Macho hawks won't like the word "permission," and in fact Dean might have chosen a better word to characterize the consultative process that should have preceded the war. Asking permission doesn't quite become a superpower, but a little bit of humility would have gone a long way toward getting global support for rebuilding Iraq. Instead we got unilateralism, and we're mostly facing the chaos of Iraq alone.

But Kerry wasn't content to bash Dean about his Iraq stance; he insisted the front-runner was saying he'd seek U.N. permission for any war -- even one necessary to defend the U.S. from an imminent threat. "For Howard Dean to permit a veto over when America can or cannot act not only becomes little more than a pretext for doing nothing, it cedes our security and presidential responsibility to defend America to someone else -- a danger for both our national security and global stability," Kerry said. Fox News gave Kerry's claims big play Wednesday night, with Carl Cameron intoning darkly that according to Kerry, Dean "would cede U.S. authority to France" when it came to self-defense. France! The horror ...
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But Kerry isn't. For more than a year the Massachusetts senator has wavered and waffled and tried to have it both ways: To pose as an antiwar candidate though he voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the war; and then to vote against the $87 billion for reconstruction after he'd authorized the war. In the days since Saddam's capture, though, Kerry's been particularly shameless, trying to share credit for toppling the tyrant after running away from his war-authorization vote for months.
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This article sums up my view of Kerry and his attacks on Dean.