"To Defeat Evil, We May Have To Traffic In Evil..."

. . . Like coercive interrogations, Ignatieff once wrote.

Or having some guy named Bob who used to be your roomie back in college follow you everywhere on the campaign trail, goading you about it. Or having Stephane Dion pile on, bringing up something you once said about calling in the U.S. Marines to impose a two-state solution on Palestine and Israel.

Hey. Wait a minute. That sounds like a pretty good idea.

But it's all such old news. Here's what he told me, weeks ago:

". . . I’ve been accused of a lot of things that simply aren’t true. I have a really deep and abiding horror of torture. The idea that I advocate for torture is anathema to me. The idea that I would be an apologist for brutality and violence. . . I don’t know why the hatred is there. There is some. But I take full responsibility for that as well. I’m an adult. I’m a responsible human being, I m responsible for everything I’ve said and for everything I’ve done, and for the emotions that I arouse. All I can do is patiently work away, interview by interview and encounter by encounter, with people’s hostility and misapprehensions, and try to correct them. But I’m entirely reconciled to the fact that there will always be people who find me a controversial character.”

Besides, everyone will forget about it once it gets around that Gerard Kennedy used to go by the name Doctor Crank: