Hatfield has been lionized by the left as, to use the words of a publicist at White Cloud Press (which in 2000 published the senator's autobiography,"Against the Grain"), "the most progressive politician in the Republican Party since Abraham Lincoln." According to the publicist, "For five consecutive Senate terms, Hatfield made his mark, sometimes softly, sometimes stridently ... opposing the military-industrial complex and the violence of the arms race" and fighting for "basic human dignity."

 What if the Iraq War stopped being a right vs. left issue, as it has largely become? What if more people realized that support for basic human dignity means support of efforts to remove from power, when possible, those who deprive their own people of human dignity and threaten ours as well?

 Bob Dole once said, "No matter whether you agree with him or not, everyone who has had the pleasure of serving with him knows that Mark Hatfield is a man of integrity." But it seems that leading newspapers quote men of integrity only when politically useful. Sure, a Kerry endorsement by the tiny Crawford weekly can be Democratic campaign fodder and maybe even produce a chuckle. Why not report a surprising statement that might make us think?