I don't often praise Democrats, but I want to point out that there have been at least three who have been acting as statemen, rather than politicians, recently. One is Joe Biden (surprisingly to me, because I've never been very impressed with him in the past). A second is Evan Bayh. And a third is Bob Kerrey. It's a shame that they have to share a party with the likes of Ted Kennedy.

I was also gratified to see Condi Rice amend her previous statement ("Nobody could have imagine using planes as weapons") which is hands-down the dumbest thing that she's ever said (and it's rare for her to say things remotely dumb). She said in this morning's hearing that she should have said "I couldn't imagine..."

I also disagree with her that armoring cockpits was the only thing that we might have done to prevent 911. A different attitude toward hijacking by the public would have helped as well. Now that we have the mentality that there are purposes of hijacking beyond extortion--that there are worse things than losing an airplane and its passengers, it will be much more difficult if not impossible to hijack an aircraft, and if we'd somehow had that mentality prior to 911, the towers might still stand.

[Late afternoon update]

Just in case anyone was confused, I was referring to Senator Kerrey's piece in the Wall Street Journal today, to which I linked above (sorry, registration may be required), not his hectoring performance in the hearings this morning.

I think you need to fix the Bob Kerry hyperlink.

Did you mean to link to this?

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004923

But nobody would have agreed to shoot down a commercial airliner becasue it had the potential to hit a high vaule target until a jet was actually used as a weapon. Not to mention that it is highly unlikely that we could even shoot down a plane today if there was just a short time between a takeover and the actual impact. We just don't keep that many military jets in the air.

I didn't watch the whole hearing, but what I did see actually caused my opinion of Kerrey to go down.

I mean, I've seen witnesses in a hearing like that try to duck the questions, but I can't remember ever before having watched a panelist try to duck an answer.

I wasn't referring to shooting down airliners--I was referring to self defense on the part of the passengers.

And Kevin, I was referring to Kerrey's WSJ piece. He does seem to be a bit bipolar lately, as the hearing today demonstrated.

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