There's nothing in John Kerry's life since he volunteered for combat in Vietnam and won five medals while I collected five deferrments that would suggest he is anywhere as tough against America's adversaries as I am.
Actually, the offical transcript hardly needs improvement: “there isn't anything in John Kerry's background — oh, for the last 30 years — that gives you any reason to believe that he would, in fact, be tough in terms of prosecuting the war on terror.”
Matthew Yglesias: 75 Percent Of What catches Condi Rice floundering when asked how many al-Qaeda people are being counted as “leaders” when Bush et. al say they have captured or killed '75 percent of the al-Qaeda known leadership' . Given the vagueness of her answer, which appears due to total ignorance as to either the real facts or how this factoid was concocted, Matt Yglesias concludes “they could mean as few as eight people.”
Speaking of polls, something odd and interesting has happened to this thread on election polls and predictions — it's basically been hijacked and turned into an open forum by people with something to say.
I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about that.
One the plus side, it's no cost to me, interesting to read along, and nice that readers are forming a proto-virtual-community. Where's the harm?
On the minus side, there's reasons I never created a single open thread the way, say, Daily Kos routinely does. While I like comments very much, it's a 'personal blog', not one that tries to be all things to all people, and those aren't my topics anymore. Worse, the civility level is not always optimal, and I think I'm not doing a great job of policing it.
So, should I
A) Close comments there? (Unlikely)
B) Sit back and enjoy it? (Likely, but would require amending my comments policy to note exceptions to my request for vague relevance to topic)
C) Like B, but police a bit more.
D) Create an open thread once in a while to allow topic re-set and keep the size of the thing reasonable (Possible, but I'm strangely, perhaps irrationally, reluctant)
E) Other? (Please explain)
New poll results look much better for Kerry:
Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry gained ground at President George W. Bush's expense in polls taken in Florida, New Jersey, Iowa, New Mexico and New Hampshire after last week's presidential debate.
Kerry has a 2 percentage point edge in Florida and the candidates are tied in New Hampshire, two states that were among those Bush won in 2000, according to the American Research Group.
In New Mexico and New Jersey, Kerry leads by 3 percentage points, within the error margin, according to polls. Bush and Kerry are tied in Iowa. The three states backed the Democratic nominee in 2000.
“Independent voters, who shifted to Bush from Kerry beginning just prior to the Republican convention, seem to be shifting back to Kerry, and that trend has intensified in the days following the first debate,'' American Research Group President Dick Bennett said in an e-mail.
One's tempted to say this is the start of major Kerry “momentum.” Trouble is, I have come to mistrust all the polls. In order to believe one, I'd need to know lots more, starting with what percentage of the electorate they think will vote, and how that number compares to 2000. I think that turnout, at least in the 'swing' states, will be substantially greater than four years ago, especially among the younger voters. Is this reflected in their models?
Then again, I suspect that exit polls got the Florida vote right (showing a Gore win), and the actual count got it wrong — in substantial part due to the “butterfly ballot” people who were polled but not properly counted. But with exit polls we don't have any doubt about who the 'likely voters' might be, so the sampling problem is easier.
Could it be that there is hope for the Republic?
Yesterday I suggested that what people thought of the foreign policy part of the debate would depend a great deal on whether they had the facts to detect Cheney's artfully delivered deadpan mendacity. Today the media — both blogs and traditional sources — went into high fact-check mode. Summaries at Needlenose and White House Briefing.
Cheney's best zinger was the he went to the Senate to preside over it most every Tuesday and yet he'd never met Edwards before the debate. Both parts are a lie: Cheney's Senate presiding record is rather limited, and Cheney is on archival TV footage sitting next to Edwards at a dinner three years ago. (The Democrats put out a nice video about it.) And the part about Edwards's hometown paper was not real accurate either…
I think the major print and network media willingness to fact-check all of a sudden (where have they been for the past three years?) is largely due to pressure via blogs, which has served as a counter-weight to the right-wing domination of cable TV and AM radio, those modern yahoos who treat questioning the Maximum Leader as a form of treason. Now we have sane people noting that letting the Leader and Assistant Leader (however we sort the roles) lie with impunity is itself perhaps not the essence of patriotism.
Brad DeLong thinks that Cheney lying about the small stuff is major:
I believe that Cheney's loss to Edwards will, by this weekend, be seen as even greater in magnitude than Bush's loss to Kerry last Thursday. This is just too good a story not to dominate public memory.
In the future, when people talk about most devastating moments in vice presidential debates, they will not talk about Lloyd Bentsen's riposte to Dan Quayle's claim to be the second coming of JFK; they will talk about Dick Cheney's forgetting that he had ever seen John Edwards before.
In other words, the conventional wisdom is hardening that Cheney has committed a gaffe—one of those silly small things that the press pounces on and turns into a mountain when it (1) thinks the small thing is sympathetic magic for a big important thing (2) that the press believes to be true, but (3) doesn't have the guts to say directly.
Trial by gaffe is a nutty way to pick the government of the world's greatest superpower. But it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Update: Digby points to Just My 2 where you will find some very high-ranking Republicans who have gone on record in the strongest and most definite terms that even minor mis-statements in a Presidential debate (even something as small as where and when you were with a public official) indicate something profound and troubling about a candidate.
This is a good flip-flop: The President's Stance on Torture is now that he's against it. Nice to see that public outrage can still achieve something.
Heartbreaking that it takes massive public outrage just to keep the (official) anti-torture status quo.
Recent Bluessky Posts
Jotwell Blenderlaw