Kerry supporter Mickey Kaus, sensible and fair as usual:

Ted Kennedy is going to be attacked for saying that the war in Iraq has “made the mushroom cloud more likely, not less likely.” But why shouldn’t he say it? That’s what the campaign is mainly about–namely, whose policies will minimize the risk of a “nuclear 9/11″. … Dick Cheney was similarly within his rights to argue that if Kerry’s elected “the danger is we’ll get hit again.” That’s his argument. …The point is that neither argument can be ruled out of bounds as excessive fear-mongering–after 9/11, fear of catastrophic terrorism in the U.S. clearly isn’t excessive at all. The arguments need to be judged on their merits.

Kaus thinks that, on the merits, Kennedy’s argument is the better one, and he makes a decent case for that proposition. Myself, I’m not comfortable backing Kennedy’s assertion about the war in Iraq specifically, but I do believe — or perhaps I should say I feel, since this sort of predictive argument is inevitably at least partially gut-based — that four more years of Bush would make the mushroom cloud more likely than four years of Kerry would.

At any rate, I think Kaus is right that a debate on the merits is necessary, and that Cheney’s comment therefore wasn’t out-of-bounds. On the other hand, if one feels that Cheney’s statement (or at least the now apocryphal Dowdified version thereof) was out-of-bounds, then so must Kennedy’s be, clearly.

However, I think it is beyond the pale to repeatedly and systematically imply that terrorists support Kerry (and/or vice versa).