Dinesh D'Souza in a Salon interview to plug his new book:

...take somebody like Ted Kennedy. Go through his speeches over the last three years. Find every speech in which he refers to Saddam Hussein and bin Laden and take all the worst things that he says about them and line them all up, and then take all the things he says about Bush and the right wing, and you line them all up, and you compare them, you'd make an amazing observation, and that is that the condemnations of Saddam Hussein and bin Laden are quite sparse. They do exist, but they are not profuse.

I want to flag this, in particular, because I know (from watching the mainstream media's reaction to Ann Coulter's verbal roadside bombs) what's going to be said about D'Souza -- yeah, maybe he goes too far, but isn't he basically right about some of these things? The media accepted Coulter's premise that only on the left did 9/11 survivors take political stands -- ignoring the simple fact that a number of family members of 9/11 survivors lined up in '04 for Bush. What's going to happen with D'Souza is that the Ted Kennedy line is going to be accepted as fact -- because, hey, it's Ted Kennedy, the big fat irresponsible liberal.

What Ted Kennedy has actually said, in speech after speech after speech, is: Saddam was a bad guy, but he wasn't affiliated with Al Qaeda and he wasn't on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons or other WMDs -- whereas Al Qaeda is still really, really dangerous. Getting bogged down in Iraq was bad because it made fighting Al Qaeda and other jihadists harder.

So when you're watching some cable chat show or the Today show and no one is willing to challenge the premise that Ted Kennedy criticizes Bush more than he criticizes bin Laden, remember, for instance, this Ted Kennedy speech from September 27, 2004:

... Our preoccupation with Iraq has given Al Qaeda more than two full years to regroup and plan murderous new assaults on us. We know that Al Qaeda will try to attack America again and again here at home, if it possibly can. Yet instead of staying focused on the real war on terror, President Bush rushed headlong into an unnecessary war in Iraq....

The Bush administration's focus on Iraq has left us needlessly more vulnerable to an Al Qaeda attack with a nuclear weapon. The greatest threat of all to our homeland is a nuclear attack. A mushroom cloud over any American city is the ultimate nightmare, and the risk is all too real. Usama bin Laden calls the acquisition of a nuclear device a "religious duty." Documents captured from a key Al Qaeda aide three years ago revealed plans even then to smuggle high-grade radioactive materials into the United States in shipping containers.

If Al Qaeda can obtain a nuclear weapon, they will certainly use it -- on New York, or Washington, or any of America's other major cities. The greatest danger we face in the days and weeks and months ahead is a nuclear 9/11, and we hope and pray that it is not already too late to prevent. The war in Iraq has made the mushroom cloud more likely, not less likely....

Yeah, Ted Kennedy pounds away at Bush, but he says bin Laden is hell-bent on trying to kill all of us with nuclear weapons. I think that's kinda harsh, even if D'Souza doesn't. And if no at network or cable news can bear to do the extraordinarily difficult work of fact-checking D'Souza on this, my advice is: It's called "Google." Use it.