Kerry, Then and Now

The challenge is great: An administration which made nation building a dirty word needs to develop a comprehensive, Marshall-type plan, if it will meet the challenge. The President needs to give the American people a fairer and fuller, clearer understanding of the magnitude and long-term financial cost of that effort.

That's John Kerry back in October 2002, explaining his vote to authorize force to unseat Saddam Hussein. It is an excrutiatingly long-winded exercise in senatorial bloviation–reading it will likely take more years off your life than smoking a carton of non-filtered Pall Malls.

But it is also pretty consistent with his current "W stands for wrong" line on Iraq: "If there's one thing I learned from my own experience in a war, I would never have gone to war without a plan to win the peace."

I find Kerry's emphasis on the cost of the war in Iraq less than compelling: Either the war is vitally important (and in that case, damn the expenses) or it's not (in which case, explain how you're going to yank troops out sooner than the end of your first term).

But I'm actually glad to see the douchebag (as some of his more honest supporters have dubbed him) fight back, if only to keep the race interesting.