Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Something to die for

William Kristol:

WHO WOULD HAVE EXPECTED the Washington Post to inflict real damage on John Kerry's faltering presidential campaign? Yet they have.

Here is the third paragraph from today's front-page article by Helen Dewar and Tom Ricks on Kerry's foreign policy record:

Kerry's belief in working with allies runs so deep that he has maintained that the loss of American life can be better justified if it occurs in the course of a mission with international support. In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."

When the Bush campaign talks about John Kerry's wanting a "permission slip" from the U.N., many commentators dismiss it as rhetorical excess. But Kerry really does believe that the United Nations is a fundamental, legitimizing body for the use of U.S. force....

I think Kerry was probably worried about being in a quagmire in Bosnia. But if the UN is in charge of the quagmire it is acceptable. The irony is that we did go into Bosnia without the UN and are still there and Kerry has proposed no time table for bringing home those troops. Apparently there is a unilateralism exception for Democrat presidents.