http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...rry/index.html

extract

While President Bush and the country were enduring an awful week of
hearings about 9/11 intelligence failures, and of widespread death and chaos
in Iraq, Kerry did not join the fray. Instead he delivered a curiously timed
economics speech. In not capitalizing on the disasters rocking the Bush
administration, Kerry was, I hope, invoking the rule that in politics one
should never commit homicide on an opponent who is committing suicide.
Moreover, no one should have expected the Vietnam veteran to make political
hay over the death of American soldiers. Even as the bloody violence in Iraq
led critics, chief among them Kerry's Senate seat mate Ted Kennedy, to
declare Iraq was becoming Bush's Vietnam, Bush campaign strategists were
trying to use Vietnam against Kerry, rehashing old allegations that the
decorated veteran's opposition to the war in which he heroically served was
somehow unpatriotic, or worse.