SÍ QUE LO DEBE tener mal Kerry que hasta Kevin Drum, un destacado blogger muy crítico con la política de Bush, casi defiende al presidente de los Estados Unidos en una reseña publicada ayer en el New York Times sobre último libro del historiador Arthur Schlesinger:

The ambiguous language is telling, because the fact is that in the three years since 9/11, dissent has been alive and well, and aside from a bit of heavy-handed crowd control at its own campaign events, no one in the Bush administration has done much of anything to stifle it. So what's the problem? We never really learn.

[...] An imperial presidency inevitably brings with it abuses of power, and Schlesinger's list of Bush administration abuses is by now a familiar litany: the Patriot Act, the Orwellian ''Total Information Awareness'' program to collect personal information in a national database, the Guantanamo detentions and the near gutting of the Freedom of Information Act. If the book had gone to print a few weeks later than it did, the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib would surely have been included as well.

Yet Schlesinger's case for the uniqueness of these abuses doesn't really convince. Similar things happened after World War I, he admits -- but, he says, only because we had a sick president and a bad attorney general. Similar things didn't happen during World War II -- with the ''notable exception'' of the internment of Japanese Americans. That's quite a notable exception. We might add the Red Scare of the 1950's and the Cointelpro abuses of the 60's to the list, and then begin to wonder if our national reaction to 9/11, far from being unprecedented, has actually been rather restrained.

La verdad es que Kevin, aun siendo muy crítico con el inquilino de la Casa Blanca, casi siempre ha mantenido un tono más que razonable y razonado; esto no hace más que confirmarlo.