Via Andrew Sullivan, taking the Democratic presidential candidate to task (and precluding any criticism from me for the next several weeks or so):

No flip-flop here: "Senator, I will say this. I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist." - John F. Kerry, Congressional Testimony, April 22, 1971.

"I have always said from day one that the goal here . . . is a stable Iraq, not whether or not that's a full democracy. I can't tell you what it's going to be, but a stable Iraq. And that stability can take several different forms." - John F. Kerry, April 14, 2004.

Oddly enough, the Senator has never been so candid. Lost in the late-Sixties, early-Seventies defeatism that dinosaurs still think is "progressive"? Want a president who shrugs his shoulders at dictatorship, the prime ingredient for cultures that have sempiternally trampled the rights of men, which today spawn legions of terrorists? Whose language indeed endorses abandoning 25 million Iraqis to the fast work of strongmen? Who will return us to the blinkered "stability" that brought about September 11th? John Kerry's your man.