Turn Back the Clock

Remember how Teddy Kennedy would always howl about how Scalia and Thomas (and -- whew! -- almost Bork) were about to Turn Back the Clock and return us to the days of back alley abortions? Remember how Democrats would derisively claim Reagan would Turn Back the Clock on almost any issue ad nauseum?

This is Kerry's foreign policy position in four words, and Mark Steyn nails it:

This has been a very dispiriting election, mainly because one party simply refuses to make any intelligent contribution to the debate. . . . [T]he Democrats have gone one further — peddling an old face with old ideas on the theory that Americans are worn out by the wild ride of the Bush years and really do long to ‘get back to where they were’, back to September 10, to the summer of shark attacks and missing Congressional interns. But all that going back to September 10 means is that you’ll have to learn the lessons of the morning after all over again: I do believe that if clueless, complacent Kerry won, more Americans — and Britons and Canadians and Australians and Europeans — will die in terrorist ‘nuisances’.

But he won’t win. Because enough Americans understand that going back to where we were means a return to polite fictions and dangerous illusions. You can’t put that world back together.