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Good morning!

Those dems are a wacky bunch, whoda thunk they'd be a big fan of the Bush Doctrine?

Give President Bush's critics credit for versatility. Having spent months assailing him for doing too much after 9/11--Iraq, the Patriot Act, the "pre-emption" doctrine--they have now turned on a dime to allege that he did too little before it. This contradiction is Mr. Bush's opportunity to rise above the ankle biting and explain to the American public what a President is elected to do.

Any President's most difficult decision is how and when to defend the American people. As the 9/11 hearings reveal, there are always a thousand reasons for a President not to act. The intelligence might be uncertain, civilians might be killed, U.S. soldiers could die, and the "international community" might object. There are risks in any decision. But when Presidents fail to act at all, or act with too little conviction, we get a September 11.

This is the real lesson emerging from the 9/11 Commission hearings if you listen above the partisan din. In their eagerness to insist that Mr. Bush should have acted more pre-emptively before 9/11, the critics are rebutting their own case against the President's aggressive antiterror policy ever since. The implication of their critique is that Mr. Bush didn't repudiate the failed strategy of the Clinton years fast enough. Continued

Kerry, thy middle name is toast.

"Now how can this happen in the United States of America in the way that it happens? . . . Who among us thinks it's right to say so quickly, on short notice, before you even know where your next paycheck's going to come from; before you know, if you haven't been working, what skill you can apply to be able to earn a paycheck; before you've been able to adjust to the loss and begin to be able to get back into life?" ~John the toast Kerry

Some Democrats are worried that their presumptive nominee's campaign is suffering from the candidate's inability to put a period in his sentences. They say an arguably trivial trait -- Kerry's penchant to wander off into the rhetorical woods -- has already proved damaging. Link

The nuanced nincompoop crowd.

A demonstrator leaps into the air as he pummels an effigy of President Bush (news - web sites), below, during a protest against Bush's policies during a visit by the president to Boston, Thursday, March 25, 2004. On rival John Kerry (news - web sites)'s home turf, President Bush defended his record on both the jobs and terrorism fronts on Thursday and prodded the Massachusetts senator against taking his own state for granted at a $1.2 million fund-raising dinner in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)