The moral of the story: In a piece where she likens Bush's response to Saddam Hussein to "the guy who reserves a hotel room and asks you to the prom," Maureen Dowd accuses John Kerry of "sidestepping the central moral issue":

It was wrong for the president to take on Saddam as a response to 9/11, to pretend the dictator was a threat to our national security, to drum up a fake case on weapons and a faux link to Al Qaeda, and to divert our energy, emotions and matériel from the real enemy to an old enemy whose address we knew.

It was wrong to take Americans to war without telling them the truth about why we were doing it and what it would cost.

It wasn't the way W. did it. It was what he did.