THIRTEEN MONTHS AGO, Senator Hillary Clinton rose on the Senate floor to demand answers to questions about what President Bush knew about the September 11 attacks before those attacks occurred. Dick Gephardt (then minority leader in the House) echoed the demand, asking “what the president and what the White House knew about events leading up to 9/11, when they knew it, and most importantly, what was done about it at the time.” The Notebook editors at the New Republic couldn’t resist a little second guessing of their own–directed at Attorney General John Ashcroft’s post-attack request for a higher budget for counterterrorism: “[S]omeone should ask why he didn’t mobilize some of those resources beforehand,” scolded the magazine in its June 17, 2002 issue. It’s a year later and leading Democrats are again throwing bricks at the president’s handling of intelligence. So is the New Republic. But this time the charge is that the president overestimated the threat to American security posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. A year ago he was too cold. Now he’s too hot. The Democrats and their allies want the president to be just right.

The trouble with both sets of attacks is not their inconsistency–though that is amusing–it is that they lack a standard to instruct a commander in chief’s action. This is the freedom that lack of authority brings: Every action can be second guessed, even if the second guessing makes no internal sense.