Take the Patriot Act. Kerry condemns it fiercely as the stuff of a "knock-in-the-night" police state. He vows "to end the era of John Ashcroft" by "replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time." So does that mean he voted against it in 2001? Au contraire! Kerry voted for the law -- parts of which he originally wrote. He singled out its money-laundering sections for particular praise but declared that he was "pleased at the compromise we have reached on the antiterrorism legislation as a whole." Bottom line, then: Is Kerry for or against the Patriot Act? Absolutely.

Then there's the war. Many observers have remarked on Kerry's dual stand on the military campaign that liberated Iraq -- he voted for it but vehemently condemns it. In 1991, by contrast, he did the opposite: He voted against using force to roll back Iraq's invasion of Kuwait yet he claims it was an operation he firmly supported. "I believed we should kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait," Kerry told The Washington Post last month. So why did he vote no? Because he wanted the first President Bush "to take a couple more months to build the support of the nation." Or so he says now. What Kerry actually said in 1991 was that there was a "rush to war" that might lead to "another generation of amputees, paraplegics, burn victims." He blasted the elder Bush for being too "unilateral" -- hmm, that sounds familiar -- and demanded: "Is the liberation of Kuwait so imperative that all those risks are worthwhile at this moment?" Eleven days later he wrote to a constituent that he opposed the war and had wanted to give economic sanctions "more time to work." Nine days after that he wrote to the same constituent and said that he "strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis." Reviewing the bidding, then, Kerry's position is that he voted against a war he was really for and voted for a war he was really against. But the war he was really for he never said he was for at the time. Except when he was writing to voters to say that he was. And that he wasn't.