Flip-Flopper?

The Center for American Progress lists 25 [count 'em, 25!--ed.] issues on which Mr. Bush has either flopped or flipped.

Not, by the way, that John Kerry is an unfairly maligned rock of consistency. But take a close look at his latest justification of his war vote, contrary to the CW about the dynamics of the race, is an example of Kerry obstinately maintaining a bad position. Unlike the press corps, we here at FW don't necessarily go into an autistic fit when a candidate makes a statement that requires a tiny (repeat: tiny) expenditure of mental energy to understand. Kerry said, in essence, that even though he now knows that there were no WMD in Iraq, he still would have supported a resolution authorizing the president to go to war. (Maliciously confusing, right?) Kerry is trading on the fact that it wasn't a war resolution per se, but an authorization resolution granting the president an authority Kerry feels "a president ought to have." This is hardly an incomprehensible subtlety (actually, it's very easy to get one's head around). The problem is that it's quite literally an asinine position. A president has plenty of tools for applying diplomatic pressure, whereas a blanket war authority is not a diplomatic tool and something that the Congress should not automatically surrender to the executive.

One would have hoped that Kerry had the balls to say his vote was a mistake based on faulty intelligence and an underestimation of the incompetence of the administration. Instead, he takes the view that---now watch this carefully---the war itself was an error, and that the reconstruction of Iraq has been horribly botched, but that---are you watching?---he was right, on the basis of some Constitutional "principle" that he pulled out of his ass, to give the president authority to go to war. (For the record, I supported---and still support---the war on humanitarian grounds, and I could explain why if challenged.) Is this an example of exactly the sort of poll-driven obstinacy that some of us accuse Bush of all the time? Is the pope a goy?