With Kerik’s confirmation as homeland security chief all but assured on Capitol Hill, the media has fallen dutifully in line, offering almost uniformly glowing coverage — except for the odd mention of the opportunism charges that have surrounded Kerik since his days as Giuliani’s chauffeur, and brief reminders of his failed, abbreviated attempt last year to train Iraqi police officers.

But there’s one telling item from Keriks past that has been conveniently left out of the coverage, much to his relief no doubt, as he tries to display some semblance of bipartisanship during his upcoming Senate confirmation hearings. And that was Kerik’s head-swiveling attack on Sen. John Kerry during the campaign last spring, when he suggested that if the Democrat were elected president, the country would practically invite another deadly terrorist strike. It was the same blunt line of attack (“Democrats = mass death”) that Vice President Dick Cheney, among others, honed during the closing months of the campaign. But Kerik was the first prominent Republican to make the charge, telling the New York Daily News on April 22, “If you put Sen. Kerry in the White House, I think you are going to see that happen.” (Months later Kerik claimed the Daily News had misquoted him, but he never requested a correction.)

In late July Kerik modified his stance slightly, telling CNN that a Kerry presidency would not necessarily invite another terrorist attack, but the Democrat would be weak in dealing with one if it came: “I fear another attack, and I fear that attack with a John Kerry, Senator Kerry, being in office responding to it.”

Yet, with Kerik headed for a Cabinet post, his ugly attack on the Democratic nominee has slipped right down the memory hole. To date, according to a search of the Nexis electronic database, only two news organizations have reprinted Kerik’s shot at Kerry: USA Today and the New York Times. Not even the New York Daily News has bothered to remind readers of their earlier story.

Instead, the press, adhering to its Bush-era tendency of playing nice with hardball-loving Republicans, describes Kerik’s vicious partisan streak in the nicest possible way. On National Public Radio, Kerik was described merely as “a strong supporter of President Bush in the presidential campaign this year.”

On Dec. 2, the Cox News Service described Kerik as “a solid Bush backer who took to the presidential campaign trail earlier this year to defend the administration’s record against attacks by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., that Bush hadn’t done enough to safeguard the country against future attacks.”

Two days later the New York Post’s Vincent Morris penned almost the exact same description: “Kerik was a strong supporter of Bush during the re-election campaign, defending the president from charges by Democratic challenger John Kerry that Bush had failed on many fronts to adequately protect the country against new attacks.”

Part of the reason the press has taken a pass on Kerik’s hatchet past may be that Democrats themselves have failed to make an issue out of it. The opposition party’s ingratiating tone has been set by New York’s two Democratic senators, Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton. No doubt anxious to keep Homeland Security’s spending spigots open and flowing in their state’s direction in coming years, Schumer and Clinton have both hailed the choice of Kerik, the hometown cop. Still, that’s no excuse for journalists to look the other way and ignore the fact that Bush’s choice for the Homeland Security position was willing to say whatever it took to get a Republican elected president  and perhaps to get himself a Cabinet appointment.

Kerik, the decorated detective, leads an investigation into the safety of cheaper Canadian prescription drugs and accompanies Giuliani to his appearance before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, where he testifies on their danger. (Kerik and Giuliani are rewarded handsomely by their client, the U.S. pharmaceutical drug lobby.) After John Kerry closes the gap in the presidential debates, Kerik rushes to the rescue, ominously warning of terrorist attacks: “If you put Senator Kerry in the White House, I think you are going to see that happen … and I don’t want to see another 9/11.” At last, having pledged to keep America “safer,” Bush announces Kerik, rags-to-riches personification of post-9/11 resolve, as the new secretary of homeland security. The legend lives on.

The Department of Homeland Security is a bureaucratic Byzantium consisting of 22 agencies with a budget exceeding $40 billion. Its current secretary, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, has made it best known for his announcement of color-coded terrorist alerts and his call to citizens to wrap their houses with plastic and duct tape. The department’s notorious dysfunction prompted a devastating analysis by expert Stephen E. Flynn in this fall’s Foreign Affairs: “The transportation, energy, information, financial, chemical, food, and logistical networks that underpin U.S. economic power and the American way of life offer the United States’ enemies a rich menu of irresistible targets. And most of these remain virtually unprotected.”

The department’s creation was first proposed in the report of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, commissioned by President Clinton and delivered to President Bush. “A direct attack against American citizens on American soil is likely,” it warned. Like the pre-9/11 alarms by the CIA and the National Security Council’s former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, this was studiously ignored by the Bush administration, which had dismissed terrorism as a “soft” issue, a “Clinton thing.”

After 9/11, Senate Democrats proposed a new department, which Bush initially resisted. Then he offered his own version that would deny labor union recognition to workers. In the midterm elections of 2002, Bush declared that the Democrats were “not interested in the security of the American people.” Republican TV commercials morphed the faces of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Democratic senators into one another — and the Republicans captured the Senate.

Kerik’s appointment was suggested to Bush by Giuliani. With this favor, Kerik’s meteoric career has reached its zenith. The son of a prostitute, high school dropout Kerik fathered an illegitimate daughter in Korea whom he refused to acknowledge and support. He was a bodyguard for members of the Saudi royal family and then became a New York narcotics cop. In 1993, he was tapped as Giuliani’s chauffeur and bodyguard. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Giuliani made Kerik deputy police commissioner and chief of the Corrections Department, a Republican patronage dump. One million dollars in taxpayer money used to buy tobacco for inmates disappeared into a private foundation run by Kerik without any accounting. In 2000, Giuliani leapfrogged Kerik over many more qualified candidates to appoint him police commissioner.

Kerik’s coordination of command and control on 9/11 was excoriated as “not worthy of the Boy Scouts … a scandal” by John Lehman, the conservative Republican member of the 9/11 commission.

After 9/11 Kerik spent much of his time writing a self-promoting autobiography, “The Lost Son.” The city’s Conflict of Interest Board eventually fined him $2,500 for using three policemen to conduct his research. Kerik developed a close relationship with his publisher, Judith Regan, of Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins. When she told him her cellphone was missing after a TV appearance on Fox News, Kerik sent detectives in the middle of the night to question the TV employees. It turned out Regan had simply misplaced the phone. Kerik made her an honorary police commissioner.

Dispatched to Iraq to whip Iraqi security forces into shape, Kerik dubbed himself the “interim interior minister of Iraq.” British police advisors called him the “Baghdad terminator,” and reported that his reckless bullying was alienating Iraqis. “I will be there at least six months — until the job is done,” he said. He left after three.

In waging bureaucratic battles among complex organizations and players, Kerik has less experience in Washington than he had in Baghdad. He cannot be expected to change the funding formula determined by Bush’s political calculations to favor interior Republican states — more per capita to Montana than to New York. And, undoubtedly, many of those seeking the department’s lucrative contracts will be signing up as clients of Giuliani Partners. The looting of Washington, unlike post-invasion Iraq, is legal.

In line with other second-term Cabinet appointments — Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state — Kerik will be an enforcer, a loyalist and an incompetent. In the made-for-TV version of the Bush administration he plays Kojak; in the true-life version he would be played by Peter Sellers. He is a deadpan caricature of a parody. Now the body man becomes the body. The resemblance is less to Inspector Clouseau or Chauncey Gardiner than to Caligula’s horse.