Senator Kerry Is Blowing In The Wind

John Kerry imagined a return to his 1960's glory days. But,this is 2010 and he's a tired, ineffective old chair warmer. It's time to act like a grownup.

Sen. John Kerry, whose windsurfing came to symbolize what critics derided as his tendency to heed the politics of the moment, has trimmed his sails over the significance of the recent leak of some 92,000 U.S. military documents on the Afghan war.

On Sunday evening, as news broke of the disclosure -- the documents were provided to The New York Times and others by the organization WikiLeaks -- Kerry rushed into the fray...

...Today, Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, struck a more nuanced tone. "I think it's important not to over-hype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents," Kerry said at the start of a committee hearing on prospects for negotiating an end to the Afghan war.

He said the release was unlawful and could potentially endanger U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But he also said the secret documents should be given little weight because in many cases they reflect raw intelligence, not carefully calibrated assessments of trends on the ground. Some of the documents, Kerry said, are "completely dismissible," but others are not.