Jon – Yeah, a bunch of people have sent me that excerpt. I wish I’d mentioned it. It certainly hollows out the case that Kerry should be left off the hook because 9/11 changed everybody.

But what’s also noteworthy is how terrible it makes Kerry look. First of all, what arrogance! He can’t admit that he was wrong in the 1990s? For all the grief Bush gets — sometimes rightly — for not admitting his mistakes, he’s at least conceded that we were all wrong in the 1990s.

Moreover, if Kerry knew these trends were in the works, why didn’t he do something? He wrote a book about the international mafia, not international terrorism. He didn’t berate the Clinton Administration for ignoring Osama Bin Laden. Raproachment with Vietnam is nice, but if he knew this was on the way, paving the way for cheap shower shoes from Hanoi could have waited. He didn’t do anything except plan a run for the Presidency. If Kerry was so prescient, how come I haven’t heard him cite a single example of his Churchillian warnings about the gathering storm? That would be a big story and big rationale for his candidacy but I’ve never seen any evidence of it. Surely Drum and Andrew Sullivan would be invoking such examples if they existed.