Kennedy's attacks on Bush go too far

Edward Kennedy, a man whose ideological and partisan frenzies have apparently obscured his vision, looks at George W. Bush and sees Richard M. Nixon. Perhaps Bush should be grateful. At least Kennedy has not compared the president to a member of the Senate who once skedaddled from the scene of a drowning, forgetting to inform officials about it until 12 hours later.

Is it fair to bring up Chappaquiddick 35 years after Mary Jo Kopechne's death? Only for this reason: to search out the moral authority of this mouthy man who has repeatedly seen fit to accuse President Bush of grotesquely immoral behavior.

Kennedy has said, for instance, that Bush misled the American people into a war that has resulted in more than 600 American deaths. This week, in a speech at the Brookings Institution, he went even further. The war, he suggested without precisely saying so, was meant to divert public attention from "deceptions here at home," such as a lie about when the recession started. He said Bush had created "the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon." And, news accounts inform us, he referred to Iraq as "George Bush's Vietnam."

What we have here is not simply a point of view on issues. It is vile, below-the-belt name-calling, a far remove, say, from the public pronouncements of someone like Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., who spells out policy disagreements in careful arguments. To propose as Kennedy does that the war in Iraq was politically motivated is tantamount to saying Bush has sacrificed lives for his own selfish ends — that the president is murderously Machiavellian.

If you are going to go that far, the least you could do is back up the charges with evidence and analysis. Kennedy gives us hokum and hysteria. For starters, he should figure out that

there was no political advantage in a war that would delay economic recovery, run federal spending sky-high and lead to American casualties.

As for Bush misleading the nation about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, as Kennedy has alleged, Kennedy himself had worried aloud about such weapons, as had Kennedy's Massachusetts pal, John Kerry, now running for president. Kennedy is one of those who has also said that Bush warned that the threat from Saddam Hussein was imminent. Beyond any reasonable doubt, Bush did no such thing.