With terms like “coward,” “traitor” and even the hoary fascisticism “defeatist” flying about, one hardly knows whether dissenting from the Bush party line is worth it.

Vietnam veteran John Kerry, the Democrat senator from Massachusetts, just found that out.

Cracking wise about our American Caesar, the 2004 presidential contender said, “What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States.”

An amusing remark, particularly for those of us who would welcome the change, although for different reasons than Kerry’s.

The way some of the president’s ladies in waiting have reacted, you’d think Kerry wished aloud for the president to drop dead.

Huffed House Speaker Dennis Hastert, “Senator Kerry’s remark, equating regime change in Iraq with regime change in the United States is not what we need at this time. What we need is for this nation to pull together, to support our troops and to support our commander in chief.”

Given that Kerry was referring to the next presidential election, perhaps Hastert would postpone it for five years. After all, by November 2004 we will be at war with Syria if the neoconservative warmongers get their way, and we wouldn’t want a change then, either.

Whatever. Here’s John Podhoretz, yelping from the pages of the New York Post, the print version of Fox television:

The remark, he avers, “calls into question” Kerry’s “temperament to serve as president.” As well, “it’s unfair, it’s ugly and it’s disgusting” because of the “implicit parallel he was drawing between Saddam Hussein and George Bush.”

Agrees Andrew Sullivan, “By equating the vile, totalitarian regime in Baghdad with the government of the United States, Mr. Kerry is now indistinguishable from the most hardcore anti-war leftists.”

Kerry hardly “equated” George to Saddam, although the anti-war crowd is indeed full of America haters.

But if Kerry is an America hater, he’s not so obvious about it rhetorically. And during the Vietnam War, the swift-boat Navy man earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you get those medals for actually fighting a war and getting wounded, not for flying around Texas with the National Guard or finagling draft deferments.

Anyway, like most Democrats, Kerry is a pro-abortion, pro-homosexual socialist, a believer in the megastate and every abomination that walks with it. In 2004, he might replace Bush, but regardless of our dislike and even disdain for him, the shrill reaction to his remark simply proves it have been more accurate than even he thought.

Only “regimes” whose policies are in doubt dread criticism and ridicule.

We need a regime change all right, but for the opposite reasons Kerry would suggest. This war in Iraq is just one of them.

Federal spending, particularly the welfare-education bureaucracy, has grown as fast under “the compassionate conservative,” and perhaps even faster, as it would under a Democrat.

Overall, the pro-regime Heritage Foundation reported a few months back, unconstitutional government was $800 billion bigger from 2000-2003 than from 1996-1999. Health spending increased 106 percent; education spending jumped 32 percent. As well, the expensive “homeland” security agency sprung up, with its vast array of new legal devices to improve snooping on Americans.

Electing John Kerry won’t rectify these problems. But dumping George Bush would be a good start.

R. Cort Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va. His e-mail address is: [email protected].