So Howard Dean says that while he “recognizes and supports the historic, special relationship that the United States has with Israel,” he also thinks America needs to be an “honest broker” of talks between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. He says “perhaps” he “could have used a different euphemism” besides “evenhanded” to describe America’s role in those talks. And he says “it’s not our place to take sides” in the talks. Yet he has no problem saying that “we have to get Israelis out of the West Bank,” or saying that an “enormous number” of Israeli settlements have to go.

This foreign policy position is inconsistent and illogical and hypocritical. It is also, as Senator Lieberman laid out yesterday in a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations “not consistent with our values.” Israeli civilians, after all, are under attack from terrorists much like the ones that attacked New York two year ago today. Just this week, a suicide bomber killed Dr. David Applebaum, the head of the emergency room at Jerusalem’s Shaarei Tzedek Hospital, as he was sitting in a café giving his daughter fatherly advice on the night before her wedding.

For Dr. Dean to suggest that America should act as an “honest broker” between Israel and the terrorists in that context is just sickening. That he is a leading presidential candidate of one of America’s main political parties two years after September 11 says much about how some of the lessons of that day are still unlearned — as does the fact that Vice President Cheney will appear today at the same church that is hosting, on the same day, Cynthia McKinney and other September 11 conspiracy theorists. For all the talk of winning the war on terror on the enemy’s ground, recent events remind us that the political debate is dangerous ground as well. Ms. McKinney was turned out of office by the voters, who in the end will have the last word about Dr. Dean as well.