About time a bigtimer said this.....

Josh Marshall is right - this is a good WaPo editorial.

Dionne falls short on one thing though - he gets the question wrong. The question he poses for himself is "But why are we still talking about Vietnam?". He gives the obvious answers to this, and they're fine ((1) because if it was good enough for the Swift Boat Liars, it's good enough for CBS, and (2) Bush hasn't answered the questions).

But the more important question is: Why should we still be talking about Vietnam? That question has essentially one answer: because it helps tell us what kind of people our candidates are. It's biblical in fact: you shall know them by their fruits.

By only asking the descriptive question, which is weaker than the normative, Dionne is implicitly admitting that there is no reason for the normative question - essentially caving in to Repub talking-point pressure. This is mistaken in the extreme - the normative question is far more important than the descriptive. It would have been nice for Dionne to explicitly acknowledge this.