When viewed in its entirety, Osama's latest tape is an endorsement for Bush.

Officials said that in the 18-minute long tape — of which only six minutes were aired on the al-Jazeera Arab television network in the Middle East on Friday — bin Laden bemoans the recent democratic elections in Afghanistan and the lack of violence involved with it.

On the tape, bin Laden also says his terror organization has been hurt by the U.S. military's unrelenting manhunt for him and his cohorts on the Afghan-Pakistani border.

A portion of the left-out footage includes a tirade aimed at President Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, claiming the war in Iraq is purely over oil.

The highlight of last night's SNL's was the opening segment featuring Osama. On it he said, "I thought that I wouldn't get to vote but two Kerry operatives tracked me down. Now it seems that I am registered as a resident of Cincinnati."

The polls show an election too close to call. The one thing that makes me optimistic is the Daily Kos's take on it. They have been pulling out polls from 2000 showing Bush with a bigger lead over Gore than he has over Kerry now.

Things that they are not taking into account -

1) There probably will not be an October Surprise to match last election's November Surprise of Bush's past drunk driving arrest (but not conviction). After the explosives story got out early and sank, there probably isn't anything left.

2) In 2000, the Democrats' Get Out The Vote drive was unprecedented. This time the Republicans will match it with their own GOTV drive. So far I have gotten one call and one person at the door asking me to vote for Bush compared with a call for Kerry (note to Kerry - Kristen Dunst is not likely to change my mind). Of course, the Kerry people might be scared away by my make-shift Bush sign.

Anyway, the Kos is worried. Bush is on the upswing and they know it.

Osama bin Laden has been heard from again. The far-left Daily Kos thinks that this new tape is "bad, very bad." Why?

a) After months of hoping that bin Laden is dead this shows that he is still alive.
b) Osama is threatening more US deaths.
c) It knocked negative stories about Bush off of the headlines.

The answer of course is C. The left has been equating Bush and bin Laden for some time. This indicates that they think that Bush is worse.

Someone at Kos must not have a tin ear. The quote about "bad, very bad" vanished between Friday afternoon and now.

Osama must have seen F911 or at least read an except. He refers to Bush sitting in the classroom while a student reads from "My Pet Goat".

It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American forces would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone at a time when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers. This gave us three times the time needed to carry out the operations, thanks be to God. . .

Osama must have lost something in the translation. He seems to think that Bush spent an hour in the classroom instead of 5-7 minutes and he seems to think that the WTC needed Bush's order to evacuate.

Maybe he's wearing his turban too tight.

What is the real story on the missing explosives? Who knows? Some reports say that half the explosives were gone before the war started. Some say that only three tons were present. Some footage shows something but the numbers of the seals are wrong and the markings on the barrels imply a different type of explosive. The Army has removed some materials and disposed of them from the site but they have not located the records yet to see what was included.

This means that the NYT and CBS stories were premature. So was Kerry's attack about incompetance.

Of course if things had gone as CBS planned the story would not have run yet and all of the following revalations would have come out after the election.

I hope that this is the last October Surprise.

Why don't Democrats worry about Kerry's Global Test? Because it's all a fake. They don't care in the least about UN (or French) approval.

In 1991 the Democrats made a huge fuss over Clarence Thomas's sexual harassment of a long-time employee. Even if what was claimed actually happened, it was minor stuff and not enough to keep her from following him to different agencies. Still, feminists were outraged. The rallying cry in the 1992 election was that the men "Just didn't get it."

So where was the outrage when Clinton was accused of far worse? There was none. A few feminists actually admitted that the outrage about Thomas was a ploy to try to sink a potential anti-abortion nominee.

When Bush was first elected, Liberals had specific ideas on how Bush should act. He should admit that his administration was an Electoral mistake. He should be centrist, possibly following through on some of Gore's campaign pledges.

Bush saw things differently. As the first modern president with a Republican Congress, he took his election as a mandate.

Liberal's first ploy to limit Bush had failed so they looked to international institutions to reign in Bush. They insisted that he had to get permission from the UN, NATO, and France before engaging in any major actions.

Clinton never bothered with these institutions. He took what he could get and proceeded on. His invasion of Haiti for example had virtually no international cover. The attack on Kosovo was far more unilateral than the invasion of Iraq. Clinton even launched a major missile offensive against Iraq under the name "Desert Fox" without asking anyone. It happened at the same time as Kosovo so no one noticed.

Like Justice Thomas, Bush is being held to a different standard than Clinton was or Kerry will be if he is elected.

The one hitch here is that Kerry actually is an anti-war internationalist. It is possible that he doesn't understand that he will be given latitude that Bush does not have.

Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on how President Kerry might handle his foreign policy.

Why didn't we secure Iraq? The Democrats have come up with an answer for Bush's overthrow of Iraq - it would have been fine if Bush had a plan to "win the peace." This usually includes more troops on the ground in Iraq (Kerry's version has foreign troops in Iraq but there just are not two to three hundred thousand spare troops in the free world).

There are lots of factors here. We would have had more troops at the fall of Baghdad if Turkey had let us invade from the north. Thanks to the French, they didn't, but they let us think that they would until it was too late to move the troops.

For propaganda purposes, we were slow to declare ourselves an occupying force. We wanted to be liberators, not occupiers. There is a difference under international law. Until we declared ourselves occupiers we could not declare martial law and stop the looting (which needed more troops who were in Turkey). This was a mistake but it was unavoidable. If we had known that the French were being bribed by Saddam we might have planned differently but war never goes as planned.

We did have a plan for dealing with post-invasion Iraq. We were going to rehabilitate it the same way that we did Germany and Japan after WWII. This didn't work out because we didn't shatter the Iraqi army the way that we did Germany and Japan. We made a quick rush to Baghdad only to find that the Iraqi army had vanished.

Why didn't we occupy Iraq with 400,000 troops like so many critics suggest? Because we don't have them. Clinton cut the army manpower by 1/3. He left Bush an army geared to a Clinton-era war - bombing the enemy into submission and sending in UN peacekeepers to mop up.

Should Bush admit that the world's only superpower is no longer strong enough to occupy a country like Iraq? Would that make us safer?

Should Bush have waited years to overthrow Saddam until he could re-build the army? He would have lost momentum in the War on Terrorism and possibly the sanctions on Iraq would have been lifted and Saddam would have re-armed. The point of the war was to stop this.

And what if Bush were to strip enough troops from other bases to pump up the Iraqi occupation force? Democrats already complain about the costs of the war. What if they tripled?

Bush can't talk about any of this. The Democrats would crucify him if he did. The Democrats will not talk about any of it. It would undercut their attacks on Bush.

A few days ago I complained about the Media Fund's radio ad linking Bush and bin Laden. What I said was mild compared to www.factcheck.org's assessment of the ad.

This anti-Bush radio ad is among the worst distortions we've seen in what has become a very ugly campaign. It states as fact some of the most sensational falsehoods that Michael Moore merely insinuated in his anti-Bush movie Farenheit 9/11 .

This one is wrong, wrong, wrong.

This ad rushes in where even Michael Moore feared to tread in his anti-Bush movie Fahrenheit 9/11 . Moore merely led viewers to believe -- but never actually stated -- that the bin Laden flight left while US airspace was closed. And viewers who listened closely -- very closely -- might have heard Moore acknowledge that the bin Ladens were in fact interviewed by the FBI before being allowed to leave.

Read the whole thing.

The more I think about the missing explosives story the less likely it seems. According to the story, 377 tons of explosives were looted by terrorists after the US invaded Iraq. I already mentioned some of the logistical problems in transporting this quantity. Even using semis, it would take a fleet of nearly 40 trucks.

That's assuming that terrorists knew exactly where to go and what to take.

So, if terrorists have this huge store of explosives, why haven't they used it? The likely answer is that it is easier to use ready-made weapons then to make bombs from scratch from this stuff. If this is true then it raises new questions. Specifically, why take it at all or why take all of it? If one pound can destroy an airplane, why take nearly 400 tons? Why not stop at one ton or even 100 pounds? (Actually, the missing explosives are an ingredient in the more powerful explosive that blew up the plane but that makes it less attractive to steal.)

All of this makes it really likely that the explosives were moved somewhere else before the war. There is a report that the Russians helped.

Charles Duelfer, chief US arms inspector in Iraq points out that "Iraq was awash in hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives." When dealing with these quantities, some of it is bound to slip out.

Are these explosives so dangerous that they rate special status? If so then why did the IAEA allow Saddam to keep them in 1995 instead of ordering them destroyed? And again, if they are so dangerous then why are RPGs the weapon of choice for the insergency?

Once again it seems that the media rushed ahead to air a story that would hurt Bush without having all of the facts.

The missing explosives story is incredably dirty. First there is the story itself and how it came out. It appears that the IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei wants a third term. His best shot at this needs is if there is a new administration. After 18 months he suddenly noticed that the explosives were missing and sent out a memo just before the election.

Second, both CBS and the New York Times had the story and both wanted to hold it until just before the election but each wanted to be the first to break it. That's why the story broke on the 25th instead of the 31st.

Third, NBC has raised questions about the existence of the explosives. The troops who inspected the facility didn't see any signs of IAEA seals.

Finally, there are real questions about the logistics of moving 360 tons of explosives in secret. The Captains Quarters has the math:

Bottom line this operation would take the resources of AN ENTIRE COMPANY (approx. 100 men) OVER TWO WEEKS, good Intel to know exactly where the "right" explosives were hidden and a means of breaching huge steel doors and concrete of an ASP.

And all of this would have to be done in an area with numerous intel overflights that would be looking for exactly this kind of activity in the combat zone, and not get noticed at all. Like so much of what the New York Times, CBS, and the Kerry campaign feeds us ... it just doesn't add up.

All we need is a 1960s memo typed in MS Word.

Speaking of truth, here's the text of a new radio ad by the Soros-controlled Media Fund:

After nearly 3000 Americans were killed. While our nation was mourning the dead and the wounded. The Saudi royal family was making a special request of the Bush White House. As a result of that request, nearly two dozen of Osama bin Laden's family members were rounded up. Not to be arrested or detained. But to be taken to an airport. Where a chartered jet was waiting. To return them to their country. They could have helped us find Osama bin Laden. Instead, the Bush White House had Osama's family flown home. On a private jet. In the dead of night. When most other air traffic was grounded.

This is part of their "Bush is too close to the Saudis" campaign which follows the same text as Michael Moore's F911. Like Moore, it is a mixture of facts, half-truths, and outright lies.

If you check their web site and click on the many "get the facts" links you get a much better account of what happened. They even mention Richard Clarke several times without mentioning his full role. (Pay close attention to the source for their "facts" when reading their documentation. They slip in House of Bush, House of Saud which has been discredited.)

What they don't tell you:

The Saudi request was for 140 Saudis including a couple of dozen bin Laden relatives. Most of these Saudis were college students studying in the USA.

Richard Clarke, a Clinton administration hold-over, insists that he was the person who gave the authorization for the Saudis to leave and that there was no pressure from above. Since Clarke wrote a best-seller criticizing Bush's reaction to 9/11, he is unlikely to be covering for anyone. Every time the ad says "the Bush White House" they mean Clarke.

The FBI reviewed the list of people leaving and conducted interviews. They did not want to detain anyone.

No one in the USA was likely to have any idea where Osama bin Laden was hiding. Most of the relatives are only distantly related and have never met the man. One reason Osama is so hard to catch is that he changes his location at least once every six hours. He is hardly likely to have sent an itinerary to a distant relation in the US in case they wanted to send him a Christmas card.

Arresting people for no other reason than who they are related to is a tactic of totalitarian governments such as Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Saddam's Iraq - not the USA.

Here is a revised version of the ad that is more accurate than the Media Fund version:

After nearly 3000 Americans were killed. While our nation was mourning the dead and the wounded. The Saudi royal family was making a special request of a Clinton era appointee who had been held over by the Bush administration. As a result of that request, nearly two dozen of Osama bin Laden's distant family members were rounded up. Not to be arrested or detained since none of them were suspected of any complicity. But to be taken to an airport. Where a chartered jet was waiting. To return them to their country for fear of reprisals. They were interviewed by the FBI but knew nothing about the plot or the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. After the FBI gave its ok the Clinton appointee had Osama's family flown home. On a private jet. In the dead of night. When most other air traffic was grounded.

So we are supposed to vote Bush out because of this? These people will say anything to defeat Bush.

Honesty. Last night I wrote about Kerry's history of lies. What about Bush? The Bush-bashers have been saying that Bush lied for years. Is it true?

No.

The two most commonly cited examples are the statement on yellowcake in the 2003 State of the Union address and the existence of WMDs in Iraq.

The yellowcake statement was addressed last Summer. The British still stand by their report. The Bush-basher who said that he knew the report was false as soon as he saw it admitted that he never saw it and that the report he turned in indicated that, yes Saddam was trying to buy Uranium.

As for the WMDs, Bush didn't lie, Saddam did. Saddam was sure that without WMDs, Iran would attack him. He was also sure that use of WMDs had saved him from Iran during the war in the 1980s and that the US-led coalition had not invaded Iraq in 1991 for fear of WMDs.

Accordingly, Saddam gave conflicting statements. Officially he said that he didn't have them but he couldn't say what happened to the known stockpiles that he possessed in 1991. He maintained his programs, even if the people assigned to them were actually working on unrelated projects.

Yes, Bush believed Saddam. So did everyone else. When someone who has used WMDs hints that he still has them you have to take him seriously.

Should Bush have acted? Yes. The justification for the war was not that Saddam had WMDs. It was that he was rebuilding his programs and might share them with terrorists.

Saddam's relationship with terrorists cannot be questioned although there is still argument over the relationship between the terrorists Saddam sheltered and al Qaeda.

Anyway, I have yet to hear anyone catch Bush in an outright lie. The same cannot be said for Kerry.

Someone posted a comment asking why I consider PBS to be liberal? I admit that the only things I watch on PBS are Antique Roadshow and History Detectives. I agree that PBS has some very conservative shows on - Sunday morning.

If you go to church on Sunday or simply sleep late (which is what I do) then you miss PBS's entire conservative lineup. The liberal lineup tends to show up on weeknights between 6 pm and midnight.

The show I had commented on is an example of what they put on when people are most likely to be watching. They contrasted Kerry's service with Bush's. They never mentioned any controversy about Kerry's time in Viet Nam and the transition to war protestor seemed heroic. For Bush, they never mentioned his ability as a pilot, they were too busy talking about his drinking and partying.

In some ways David Broder reminds me of Jay Leno. Leno pokes fun at both candidates but he has admitted that he always votes Democrat and cannot imagine voting for a Republican. I suspect that Broder is the same way. He tries to be fair but he votes Democrat. That is what makes his current column interesting. He starts out by listing the management style, strengths and weaknesses of each candidate. Then he sums up.

Kerry is, in Jones's phrase, a classic backbench senator, a man who has found his rewards in picking out a few issues to explore and in being noted for the way he talks about them. Such senators do not aspire to leadership posts or committee chairmanships, nor are they noted for the bills they pass. For them, government is a largely verbal arena, not one measured by concrete results.

That nails Kerry perfectly.

As a rule, Americans have preferred -- and elected -- executives, rather than legislators; governors (or generals), rather than backbench senators. Former California governor Ronald Reagan easily defeated former senator Walter Mondale; Bill Clinton did the same to Bob Dole.

What does the Washinton Times story about Kerry and the Security Council tell us? Not a lot really. Those who have been paying attention already know that he lies and that some of his lies are easily checked. During his years as a backbencher, no one really cared about the things Kerry said enough to check them.

Just for fun, let's look at the sorts of lies and exagerations Kerry tells and why. There are the ones for self-glorification. "I ran the Boston Marathon."

There are ones that he tells to avoid embarrasment. "Everyone got a goose." "I don't own an SUV."

There are the ones he tells to give himself moral authority. Christmas in Cambodia - "The memory is seared, seared into my memory."

This one falls under lies told to inflate his importance. "Foreign leaders have said that they support me." "I met with all of the members of the Security Council."

Then there are the allegations about Kerry's Purple Hearts and his Silver and Bronze Stars.

Some of the early Kerry signs said "Truth for a change". Those signs are not available from Kerry's web site any more. I wonder why?

The New York Times says that a huge cache of explosives disappeared after the invasion of Iraq. Kerry said the "incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and put this country at greater risk than we ought to be."

This is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. The White House pointed out, "We have destroyed more than 243,000 munitions" in Iraq, he said. "We've secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed."

Saddam turned the entire country into an arms cache. No matter how much is seized and destroyed, Bush is blamed if any gets out.

Besides, there is a rumor that MSNBC will be posting s story saying that the explosives were gone before the invasion.

As a new attack ad comes on, people across the country are thinking, "Just one more week and it will be over." Ha! The election is only the beginning.

According to the Democrats, Gore won the 2000 election but Bush's cousin at Fox declared Florida for Bush causing Fox to project Bush as the winner of the election. All of the other networks followed Fox's lead. Believing what he heard on TV, Gore called Bush and conceded.

Then Gore found out that there would be a recount and un-conceded. By then it was too late. Bush already had an aura of inevitability that carried him to the election.

Somehow the fact that Bush had more votes in enough states to give him an Electoral victory was irrelevant.

Learning his lessons from Gore's mistakes, Kerry's plan is this. First he will dispatch six SWAT teams of lawyers and political operatives to any of the battleground states that he does not win. He already has his team in place and office space dedicated to them. Their job is to contest any close match that Kerry loses. There will be a SWAT team within an hour of all battleground states.

On election night he will declare victory regardless of what the counts show. He will immediately name his national security team and start work on his transition team.

The first lawsuits have already been filed and lost. Democrats wanted Ohio voters to be able to wander into any precinct in their county and cast a provisional ballot. Secretary of State Blackwell directed that these clueless voters should be given directions to their proper precinct where they can cast their provisional ballot. Given that all new voters get a postcard telling them where their precinct is, this does not seem to be an unreasonable requirement. The courts agree and the Democrats have dropped the matter.

Other suits are sure to follow.

The thinking among Democrats is that the more clueless the voter the more likely he will be a Democrat. Accordingly, the Motor Voter Act and other registration drives are aimed at the people who are too lazy or ignorant to register any other way.

This opens the system to all sorts of abuses. Not long ago an Ohio man was arrested for registering 100 false names. He says that he was paid in crack cocain by a woman as part of the NAACP National Voter Fund.

The Democrats have vowed that they would retake the White House by anny means nessesary. That apparently includes fraud and frivolous lawsuits. Also voter intimidation. I've seen a tiny bit of that myself when all of the Bush yard signs for blocks around me vanished last week.

I'm beginning to envy the Afghans their realatively quiet election.

All of this is destructive the the very idea of democracy. We cannot function if the losers in the election insist that the winners stole the election. That's what has been going on for the last four years. At best, the Democrats will make the same claim for another four years. At worst they will succeed in re-taking the white house through actual theft.

This is World Population Awareness Week. Thank John Kerry for this. This represents one of the five pieces of legislation (nine if you count resolutions) that bears Kerry's name.

Who is smartest, Bush or Kerry? Someone did some estimating based on military tests that the two men took in their 20s. The result:

Mr. Bush's score on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test at age 22 again suggests that his I.Q was the mid-120's, putting Mr. Bush in about the 95th percentile of the population, according to Mr. Sailer. Mr. Kerry's I.Q. was about 120, in the 91st percentile, according to Mr. Sailer's extrapolation of his score at age 22 on the Navy Officer Qualification Test.

A little background. The college tests like the ACT and the SAT are closely related to intelligence tests. The idea was to weed out the people who would do well in college. These military test are presumably from the same family.

In a standard intelligence test, anything over 120 is considered genius. Because so few people score so high, individual questions can have a disproportionate effect on the final score. MENSA has a special test calibrated for the over-120 crowd.

Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said.

Many Americans still believe a report that began circulating on the Internet three years ago, and was quoted in "Doonesbury," that Mr. Bush's I.Q. was 91, the lowest of any modern American president. But that report from the non-existent Lovenstein Institute turned out to be a hoax.

A follow-up to the Doonesbury cartoon ran which revealed that it was a myth but implied that Bush wasn't as smart as 91. It ran September 11, 2001. The followup strips were pulled.

October Surprise? Not all that big but it is another hit for Kerry's reputation as someone who exagerates often (nuances the truth?).

Last year Kerry said this:

"This president hasn't listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable,"

It turns out that he talked with some of them, possibly as few as one. Not all members have been contacted but 4 out of 5 contacted (there are 15 members total) said that they had never met with Kerry.

An official at the U.S. mission to the United Nations remarked: "We were as surprised as anyone when Kerry started talking about a meeting with the Security Council."

Wild Goose Hunt. The goose hunt probably didn't do Kerry any good. Every account I saw started with "in an effort to show that he is a real guy..." Real guys don't need to go out and show it.

Also, you may have noticed, Kerry said that they all got geese but he was not carrying one and the other three men with him only carried one each. Either Kerry left his goose on the ground or he "nuanced" the truth.

This quote is from ABC's political blog the Note:

Meanwhile, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the woman who played a big role in the most recent news cycle (thanks to her own mouth and the relentless efforts of the well-oiled and confident Bush campaign, which on principle thinks adult children are off limits but spouses are not), holds a conversation on health care at the Yardley Community Centre in Yardley, PA at 2:30 pm ET. It is unknown whether she will make herself available for questions

Why is it that adult children off-limits but spouses are not? I thought that this was obvious but I guess not.

In 17th century France, the most coveted position was to be the person who held a fresh shirt for the King to put on in the morning. This was the first person the King saw that day and a few words by that person could set the toe for how the rest of the day would go.

In modern times this position is held by the President's wife (I can be gender specific here since there has never been a woman president).

Elenor Roosevelt ran the country while her husband was ill during WWII. Nancy Reagan is supposed to have fired her husband's Chief of Staff. Hillary Clinton got final approval on all cabinet and Supreme Court appointees.

Teresa Kerry has said that she expects to set her husband's foreign policy.

That is why we look at the spouse.

I defy anyone to name a Vice President's child who got to set policy or who even has unrestricked access to the President.

That is why the VP's children are off limits.

It bothers me a lot that the election might be won by outright lies. Sure, in past campaigns, candidates have sent out surrogates to spread stories for them. This is different. Kerry is saying the lies himself in public. The Draft, Social Security, Dairy Price Supports - Kerry insists that Bush has secret plans for all of these. He is making it up and he knows it but he will say anything to get elected.

Then there is his foreign policy. France and Germany have already said no extra troops. Iran has said that it will not give up its ability to enrich uranium. General Franks says that Iraq was the right war at the right time and that we did not out-source Tora Bora. Kerry's foreign policy is in shreds and he hasn't even been elected.

Let's not forget the contribution of Hollywood and the 527s. Both Michael Moore are lying when they list Bush's ties with the Saudis but a 527 has been running similar charges. There have been two major releases that were supposed to turn Bush out of office (I'm counting The Day After Tomorrow and F9-11). Both came out on DVD just before the election.

Democrats are already complaining about Republicans stealing the election and have started filing suits. More suits are planned for the day after the election.

I hate to see so much hate rewarded.

A Bush for President sign was stolen from my yard today. So were most of the other Bush signs in my neighborhood. Kerry supporters get a lot of publicity when their signs are stolen. I wonder if anyone will report on this?

Last week Nightline did a segment on Kerry's Silver Star. They went to Viet Nam and asked people in the village involved about what really happened. None of the accounts quite matched any of the contemporary accounts but they were closer to Kerry's account then to the SwiftVets' account. When they came back from the break, Koppel's guest was John O'Neill, the author of Unfit For Command. O'Neill was inarticulate, repeating the same thing over and over again. I suspect that he had been ambushed by the footage.

What O'Neill should have said:

"Ted, we are talking about events from 35 years ago. You have been a newsman long enough to know that over that period of time memories can become confused. This is especially true when you are working through an interpreter. It is possible that they were describing one or more different events. Contemporary accounts are much more accurate. In addition, none of them were present during the battle. The one man who said that he was there admitted that he hid during the fighting. Add in the desire of poor farmers to say what they think the rich Americans want to hear and the presence of an official minder from a government that considers Kerry a hero and you have an unreliable report. This would never stand up in a court of law."

Thomas Sowell has things to say about the Nightline segment, also.

More on George Soros here on FrontPageMag. Other good stuff from them - things the President could not say during the debates here and why Bush didn't squander the unpresidented outpourings of good will that followed 9-11.

On the debate, every time they debated several countries would file press statements denying things that Kerry said. France and Germany will not send troops and Iran will not give up uranium enrichment in exchange for fuel. Being the contender, it is not an international incident for Kerry to say these things like it would be if Bush pointed out that France, Russia and China were bribed by Saddam.

As for the world-wide fellowship that followed 9/11/2001, by 9/18/2001 the French were accusing the Pentagon of faking the whole thing.

I bet you didn't know that laser tag is an affront to human dignity.

A key question confronted the European Union last week: Should grown men and women who get their kicks by pretending to shoot one another with toy weapons have the freedom to do so?

German authorities, and now the EU's highest tribunal, think the answer to that question is no. On Oct. 14, the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice upheld a ban on the Bonn "Laserdrome", where participants simulated killing each other with lasers.

By all means lets have these people descide how America should defend itself.

Do you know who George Soros is? You should. He is the biggest force in the presidential election. All of the anti-Bush 527s get major funding from him. He is currently involved in a speaking tour for his anti-Bush book.

One of Soros's major points is the idea that we cannot force democracy at the point of a gun. He is obviously ignoring Germany and Japan. Here is an exchange between Soros and Davids MedienKritik.

PBS Frontline is showing a profile on both candidates. It is so pro-Kerry it's embarrassing. They are contrasting Kerry fighting in Viet Nam and protesting the war with Bush being AWOL. Who would have thought, PBS is slanted liberal!

Ever wonder why Kerry hasn't signed the form to release all of his military papers. Supposedly you can see all of them here. If you look at the "Honorable Discharge from Reserve" you see something amazing. It appears that he was originally given a dishonorable discharge and that this was upgraded to honorable. A full explanation is here but I will give the short version.

Kerry could easily have been given a dishonorable discharge because of his anti-war activities. He engaged in these while still in the reserve. He even made Nixon's enemies list. Nixon could have easily ordered the dishonorable discharge. The question is why Kerry would hide it if this is what happened? Being on Nixon's list was a badge of honor for the protestors. We will not know unless Kerry releases his records.

Sinclair Broadcasting is planning to air Stolen Valor, a documentary on John Kerry's anti-war activities. Some people are upset. I'm not surprised. It is never pleasant being gored by your own ox.

No one seems to be asking is if it is true? Are there any outright lies in the documentary or even any Michael Moore-style half truths packaged to give you the wrong impression? If not then what is the objection? That a media company is broadcasting material about a presidential candidate's background that could swing the election? Isn't that what CBS did with the Bush AWOL story? How are these different?

Kerry's anti-war past should not even be an issue. The Mainstream Media (MSM) should have covered this back during the primaries. Why didn't they and why is it that no MSM outlet has looked into the charges made by the SwiftVets?

Because it could hurt their candidate. By an overwhelming margin they want Kerry to win so they are holding back stories that might hurt him while running anti-Bush stories based on forged memos and partisan witnesses.

Speaking of Michael Moore, he now has two anti-Bush books on the stands plus a DVD. The Day After Tomorrow just hit the stands, also. That was the first movie that was supposed to chase Bush out of the White House.

Speaking of the CBS memos, on the radio yesterday I heard a media analyst wondering why the CBS story got so much coverage but the story about Fox's made-up quotes sank? I thought that is was obvious. The CBS AWOL story was picked up by every newspaper in the country and kicked off an ad campaign by the Texans for Truth, a 527 formed just to air advertise Bush/AWOL ads. When it turned out that the story was bad, every news outlet that had picked up the original story had to run the story about the forgeries as a retraction.

By contrast, someone at Fox typed in the wrong notes to the Fox web site. They were removed a few hours later with an apology. The scope of the story is completely different.

This guy should know that.

A New York Times article on Kerry has lots of interesting stuff.

Here's one:

When I asked Kerry's campaign advisers about these poll numbers, what I heard from some of them in response was that Kerry's theories on global affairs were just too complex for the electorate and would have been ignored -- or, worse yet, mangled -- by the press. ''Yes, he should have laid out this issue and many others in greater detail and with more intellectual creativity, there's no question,'' one adviser told me. ''But it would have had no effect.''

This is, of course, a common Democratic refrain: Republicans sound more coherent because they see the world in such a rudimentary way, while Democrats, 10 steps ahead of the rest of the country, wrestle with profound policy issues that don't lend themselves to slogans. By this reasoning, any proposal that can be explained concisely to voters is, by definition, ineffective and lacking in gravitas

Nice to know that we are too stupid to understand Kerry's secret plan and any plan that can be explained is too simplistic to work. And they wonder why the Republicans control all three branches of government.

This is the part that people are paying attention to:

When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. ''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' Kerry said. ''As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''

To put this in context, this is not that different from Bush's statement, ''I don't think you can win it,'' which Democrats pounced on. At the time Kerry said that he could win the war on terror. Now he, too, admits that he cannot.

We shouldn't jump on him for making this admission, but then, he shouldn't have jumped on Bush for saying it.

But we can argue with his tactics and his analogies. At what point does terrorism become a nuisance? I've written before about the far-left insistence that we should be ignoring terrorism. They think that, since terrorists normally kill fewer people than lightening, that we should ignore terrorism and regard 9/11 as an anomaly.

Look at Kerry's examples. Prostitution and gambling are legal in some places. He didn't mention drugs but that is where organized crime gets most of its money and some of Kerry's supporters have funded drug legalization.

No one is trying to legalize terrorism.

Similar thoughts here.

But what remarkable analogies Kerry started with: prostitution and illegal gambling. The way law enforcement has dealt with prostitution and illegal gambling is by occasionally trying to shut down the most visible and obvious instances, tolerating what is likely millions of violations of the law per year, de jure legalizing many sorts of gambling, and de jure legalizing one sort of prostitution in Nevada, and de facto legalizing many sorts of prostitution almost everywhere; as best I can tell, "escort services" are very rarely prosecuted, to the point that they are listed in the Yellow Pages.

These are examples of practical surrender, or at least a cease-fire punctuated by occasional but largely half-hearted and ineffectual sorties. It's true that illegal gambling and prostitution aren't "threatening the fabric of [American] life," but that's because they never threatened it that much in the first place. One can live in a nation with millions of acts of prostitution or illegal gambling per year or per day. There are good reasons for simply calling off those wars altogether. Surely the strategy for dealing with terrorism must be very different, in nearly every conceivable way, from the strategy for dealing with prostitution or illegal gambling.

At it's heart, though, Kerry is trying to find a way of turning the clock back to 9/10/2001. If we just share information with foreign countries and monitor banks more closely (but not as closely as the Patriot Act would have it) then we can go back to ignoring terrorism.

The rallying cry of the far Left since 9/12/2001 has been that we should be able to figure out why the terrorists hate us, make a few changes in foreign policy, and everything would be fine.

Kerry offers a different route but the same destination. The French, being so much more cosmopolitan, know everything that the terrorists are doing but will not warn us as long as Bush is in office. Also, Kerry will invade state sponsors of terrorism with small bands of special forces instead of hundreds of thousands of troops.

Kerry's view, that the 21st century will be defined by the organized world's struggle against agents of chaos and lawlessness, might be the beginning of a compelling vision. The idea that America and its allies, sharing resources and using the latest technologies, could track the movements of terrorists, seize their bank accounts and carry out targeted military strikes to eliminate them, seems more optimistic and more practical than the notion that the conventional armies of the United States will inevitably have to punish or even invade every Islamic country that might abet radicalism.

Intelligence sharing was the Clinton-era answer to terrorism. Even Clinton rejected targeted military strikes because of the impossibility of small forces fighting their way in and back out of a hostile nation. Not to mention what it would do to foreign relations if we started sending troops into other countries without warning (if we warn them then the missions would fail).

Kerry also subscribes to the notion that terrorism will wither without its leaders. If we can capture Osama bin Laden then everything will be fine.

Except the Left also says that the breakup of al Qeda's central command structure made them more dangerous.

A different Kerry belief that he has stated many times:

Kerry, too, envisions a freer and more democratic Middle East. But he flatly rejects the premise of viral democracy, particularly when the virus is introduced at gunpoint. ''In this administration, the approach is that democracy is the automatic, easily embraced alternative to every ill in the region,'' he told me. Kerry disagreed. ''You can't impose it on people,'' he said. ''You have to bring them to it. You have to invite them to it. You have to nurture the process.''

I wonder how the Senator explains Afghanistan. Millions voted. Taliban violence was minimal. Even protests about voters being able to vote multiple times have lifted. Gunpoint democracy seems to be working there.

Too bad the press is so against Bush. The last couple of days they have been attacking him with half-truths and outright lies.

Claim: Paul Bremmer says that more troops are needed to subdue Iraq.
The real story: Bremmer says that more troops were needed to stop the looting that happened immediately after Saddam fled Bagdad. The generals in charge feared that more troops might make the Iraqis hostile. He admits that they might have been right.

Claim: The report by the chief weapons inspector showed that there were no WMDs. Bush must have known that before the war and therefor lied.
The real story: Saddam wanted Iran to think that he still had WMDs. He even told his generals that he had them. When someone says, "I have WMDs and I'm not afraid to use them!" do you assume that he is telling the truth or that he is lying?

Claim: Saddam was a "dimished power" and posed no threat to the world.
The real story: Saddam had his WMD programs in mothballs but he retained enough knowledge to restart them quickly as soon as sanctions were ended. He made no secret of his intention of re-arming. The head of his nuclear program and author of "The Bomb in my Garden" says that they could have reconstructed the nuclear program in two years. Saddam was also attempting to buy long-range missles from Korea.

Claim: The sanction were working.
The real story: Saddam was skimming money off of the top of the sanctions and using it to build palaces and, more importantly, to bribe UN Security Council members. This included France, Russia, and China, countries that have veto power. Also, the sanctions were estimated to be killing somewhere between 10,000-50,000 Iraqis per year through lack of food and medical treatments (the higher numbers come from leftist organizations pushing to end the sanctions).

Claim: We should have listened to our (wiser) allies.
The real story: See the part above about bribery.

Bottom line - if we hadn't invaded when we did Saddam would still be in power and half-way to rearming.

All of this is covered in detail here.

Between attacks on Bush election headquarters, vandalism being done to Bush sign (and sometimes to the houses or yards that they are on) and the keying of cars with Bush bumper stickers, we might need those independant election monitors after all - to keep an eye on Kerry's people.

Here's a request being sent to the Attorney General by nearly fifty members of Congress:

October 7, 2004
Attorney General John Ashcroft

U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue

NWWashington DC 20530

Dear Attorney General Ashcroft:

This week, in Orlando, Florida, approximately 100 protestors stormed and ransacked the local Bush-Cheney headquarters injuring one campaign staffer who suffered a broken wrist and causing considerable damage.

According to news accounts, similar "protests" occurred yesterday across the country in Miami, FL; Tampa, FL; Kansas City, MO; Dearborn, MI; St. Paul, MN; Independence, MO; and West Allis, WI. All of the "protests" appear to be a coordinated effort by members of a major labor union to intimidate staff and volunteers of the Bush-Cheney campaign. The AFL-CIO took credit on their own website for these protests that included thousands of workers in 17 cities across the country.

In what is apparently one of those coordinated "protests", the Bush-Cheney headquarters in West Allis, Wisconsin was invaded by more than 50 protestors who disrupted campaign activities and intimidated campaign workers and volunteers. According to the Associated Press, over 100 union protestors physically stormed their way into Bush-Cheney headquarters in Miami, Florida and intimidated volunteers inside. In what could be a related incident, although the perpetrator has not yet been identified, the Knoxville, TN Bush-Cheney office was hit by gun-fire on Tuesday morning, shattering the plate-glass front doors before volunteers showed up for work.

These attacks are not conduct protected by the First Amendment. The activities were carried out on the same day throughout the country, apparently organized by the same national organization. The lack of any notice and the pattern suggest a plan to intimidate volunteers who were supporting their candidate in the upcoming
Presidential campaign.

Because these coordinated invasions violate the laws protecting the civil rights of American citizens, we request you direct the appropriate investigative unit within the Department of Justice to promptly initiate an investigation. We strongly urge that the investigation include whether federal laws have been broken, including those addressing civil rights, conspiracy, racketeering, and others protecting the rights to campaign and vote.

Most importantly, we strongly urge you to depose the participants in these attacks, and to gather any evidence regarding a possible ongoing conspiracy to launch more attacks. Those depositions are urgent, as any delay may lead to destruction of evidence that could lead to identification of those who planned and coordinated the attacks, and who should be brought to justice.

Please respond to this letter no later than October 12 with regard to what action will be taken, where it will be taken, and by which element within the Department of Justice.

In addition, we ask that you work with state law enforcement agencies in investigating a series of voting irregularities including forgeries in voter registration forms, casting simultaneous ballots in different states (double voting), and absentee voter fraud. Such activities disenfranchise those who properly register to vote and cast valid ballots.

The right to vote is essential to our democracy. The threat of intimidation and violence to those exercising this right is the antithesis of how a law-abiding and civilized nation conducts itself. Please immediately ensure that those who wish to be involved in the political process can exercise their constitutional rights without fear. All Americans, no matter whom they chose to vote for, deserve to be able to fully participate in this process without fear of intimidation or retaliation.

Sincerely,

More on the CBS documents. David Hailey, a professor at the University of Utah, claimed that he had proven that the documents must have been created on a typewriter. In a report distributed in .pdf format, he recreated the Bush memos then disected the fonts and proved that the typewritten version was a closer match to the memos than the Times Roman version.

All of this looked good for CBS and bad for Bush. Then someone took a close look at the recreated document - a real close look. He did a 400% zoom on the superscript and saw that it was sharp and clear while the surrounding letters were fuzzy. It turns out that the professor couldn't reproduce the superscript so he had typed "th" out and used Photoshop to reduce the characters and paste them into his document.

Given that small opening, the blogger comminity pounced. Within a few hours Hailey admitted that he had not actually typed the memo. He had downloaded a font based on typewriters and used that. Not mentioned is the fact that the typewriters that the font was based on are mono-spaced but the computer font is proportional.

So the professor used a proportional, computer generated font in a paper proving that the forged memos could not have been created by a computer. At best he proved that the forger also downloaded a typewriter font.

Just think how frustrated the forger must be - he downloaded a special font to make the forgeries look more convincing but everyone assumed that he used the Windows default font and he couldn't tell anyone without admitting the crime.

Wired is carrying a story about this although they left out all of the juicy parts.

Michael Moore has a new book out - the 9/11 Reader. I glanced at it to see how long it would take to find a lie. Not long at all, as it turned out.

I opened the book at random and found that I was at the chapter "Nov. 2, 2002, how did we get here from there?" It said that on election night, some networks called Florida for Gore but reversed themselves after Fox called it for Bush. (I didn't buy the book so I am quoting from memory here.)

I assume that it went on to talk about Bush having a cousin "embedded" in Fox News. The cousin declared for Bush on behalf of Fox and the other networks followed Fox's lead.

Like all of Moore's best lies, this one has just enough truth to confuse people.

The networks call states before the votes are counted through a system of exit polls done at key precincts. They know, for example, that in order to win Ohio, a Democrat has to get a high turnout in northern Ohio which is mainly Democrat and they have to capture more than a third of the vote in central and southern Ohio. They pick some precincts that are typical of these areas, take exit polls, and go from there.

In 2000, the firm that did these exit polls entered some results backwards - they got Bush and Gore reversed. This was in a district that normally would vote Republican. Since it was coming up Democrat, they assumed that other Republican districts would also go Democrat and declared the state for Gore. All of the networks declared for Gore, even Fox. About an hour later they realized their mistake. With the corrections entered, there was no clear-cut winner so all of the networks put Florida back in the undeclared column.

Sometime after midnight most of the precincts had reported in and it was clear that there were not enough uncounted ballots to change the results. As the networks came to this conclusion, they called for Bush. When the automatic recount was announced, Florida was put back in the undecided column for a second time. Fearful of being wrong again, they left it undecided throughout the entire recount fiasco even though Bush was always ahead.

Nothing underhanded about it. But if Moore prefers to peddle conspiracies than events.

Michael Moore has a new book out - the 9/11 Reader. I glanced at it to see how long it would take to find a lie. Not long at all, as it turned out.

I opened the book at random and found that I was at the chapter "Nov. 2, 2002, how did we get here from there?" It said that on election night, some networks called Florida for Gore but reversed themselves after Fox called it for Bush. (I didn't buy the book so I am quoting from memory here.)

I assume that it went on to talk about Bush having a cousin "embedded" in Fox News. The cousin declared for Bush on behalf of Fox and the other networks followed Fox's lead.

Like all of Moore's best lies, this one has just enough truth to confuse people.

The networks call states before the votes are counted through a system of exit polls done at key precincts. They know, for example, that in order to win Ohio, a Democrat has to get a high turnout in northern Ohio which is mainly Democrat and they have to capture more than a third of the vote in central and southern Ohio. They pick some precincts that are typical of these areas, take exit polls, and go from there.

In 2000, the firm that did these exit polls entered some results backwards - they got Bush and Gore reversed. This was in a district that normally would vote Republican. Since it was coming up Democrat, they assumed that other Republican districts would also go Democrat and declared the state for Gore. All of the networks declared for Gore, even Fox. About an hour later they realized their mistake. With the corrections entered, there was no clear-cut winner so all of the networks put Florida back in the undeclared column.

Sometime after midnight most of the precincts had reported in and it was clear that there were not enough uncounted ballots to change the results. As the networks came to this conclusion, they called for Bush. When the automatic recount was announced, Florida was put back in the undecided column for a second time. Fearful of being wrong again, they left it undecided throughout the entire recount fiasco even though Bush was always ahead.

Nothing underhanded about it. But if Moore prefers to peddle conspiracies than events.

Why do they hate us? No, not the terrorists, the American Left.

First some background. A universal trait of mankind is that once a group progresses beyond hunter/gatherer, members start specializing in trades and making items for trade. Once trade is institutionalized and a monetary system created you have capitalism. This was the only economic model for large groups for most of history.

In the 19th century, a couple of new economic systems were invented. These were first implemented in the early 20th century. They were Communism and fascism. During the 1920s and 1930s, intellectuals were expected to support one of these. No one supported capitalism. After the start of World War II, fascism was discredited leaving Communism. If you were an intellectual you were expected to support Communism or Socialism to some extent, especially on the campus.

Back in the 1980s, a friend who had been a communist in college admitted that the American Communist Party never caught on because they spent all of their energy justifying the actions of the USSR. This left them with a reflexive anti-American impulse.

A couple of days ago I quoted Christopher Hitchens:

I had to ask myself - is there an international socialist movement worth the
name? No. No, there is not. Okay - will it revive? No, it won't. Okay then - but
is there at least a critique of capitalism that has a potential for replacing
it? Not that I can identify."

So there is nothing left for the Left to be for but they still have that anti-American bias. This is relevant to Iraq because the anti-war movement was coordinated by the Communists.

Really.

International Answer, a leading anti-war organizer, shares its headquarters and most of its board of directors with one of the few remaining Communist groups in America.

The Left has hated Bush since before the 2000 election. Remember how many Hollywood stars said that they would leave the country if Bush was elected (sadly, they all reniged)? Gore made things worse with the recount challenges. He convinced his supporters that he had won and that George and Jeb Bush managed to keep the ballots from being counted properly.

After 9/11, the hard Left felt that we made the wrong response. Instead of war, we should be sending police after bin Laden and forcing a two state solution in Israel. There wasn't a lot of them but they were there - International Answer and Not In Our Name, protesting in favor of the Taliban.

Many of these same people had been protesting the Taliban just a month earlier when Afghan women started a web site showing Taliban oppression.

This didn't make any sense, it was simply reflexive anti-Americanism.

As the memory of 3,000 dead faded, the Left regained its voice, more frantic than before.

A telling point - one column written after the first presidential debate said that Democrats could now support their candidate instead of simply hating Bush.

Democrats talk about Republican thugs but so far the vitriol seems to be coming from them. Republicans may dislike Kerry but they don't hate him with every fiber of their being like the Democrats hate Bush.

Which brings me to:

When Democrats Attack.

Michelle Malkin has a summary of recent attacks. Part 1 here.

Not listed was a break-in of a Bush campaign office in Seattle last week.

Plus Toby Keith's bus driver was shot. This might be related because Keith is a known Bush supporter. The service man who was beaten in Columbus had been to a Toby Keith concert.

Missing the Point. After the debate, ABC came up with footage of Cheney and Edwards together at a prayer breakfast to prove that Cheney had met Edwards before they walked onto the stage.

Cheney's point was that there are only 100 Senators and Cheney is in the Senate weekly. They should know each other from there but they don't because Edwards never shows up for work. Neither does Kerry.

First impression of the VP debate - what with the desk, they came across as a father and his son being called before the high school principal. Edwards managed to carry this further with his "yes, m'am."

Cheney had some really good lines. The one about not being able to stand up to the pressure of Howard Dean; the one about Edwards' Senate record and just meeting him for the first time; the one about Kerry's voting record over the last 20 years. Edwards had a few good lines but none of them were new.

All of the conservative blogs think that Cheney won. I checked a few liberal ones. The Daily Kos thinks that Edwards won (they really liked the line about work vs. wealth as though trial lawyers actually work). Wonkette didn't have much to say on her web site but on NBC her comment was that "Edwards could have done better."

National Review Online has a good summary of the debate.

Best line.

Will the family of a Veep wannabe, dark suit, dark hair, Dark Side, license # I-S-U-E-U, please come and claim the carcass?

Your junior lawyer has been trampled, pummeled, thumped, whupped, sliced, diced, julienned, fried, pureed, laughed out of the county, and has dismayed fellow slimebags across the nation.

You may claim the remains, collected in a large number of small baggies, at the Breck^TM booth.

Funny thing, Edwards, the cute, energetic, trial lawyer was supposed to slice Cheney up one side and down the other. What happened?

So what did Kerry mean when he said "Global test"? He says that it didn't mean anything at all.

Sen. John Kerry on Monday lambasted as "pathetic" scaremongering, Republican criticism of his comments during last Thursday's debate in which he said the president's decision to go to war should pass a "global test" of legitimacy.

But he couldn't resist adding this:

But I can do a better job of protecting America's security because the test that I was talking about was a test of legitimacy, not just in the globe, but elsewhere.

Elsewhere? Beyond the globe?

Kerry is trying to say that we should ignore the part about a "global test". Even though he keeps adding it back in. I can explain this two different ways.

1) He doesn't believe what he is saying. It already hurt him politically to say that the UN Security Council should ratify any preemtive strikes so he is trying to say that he wouldn't wait for them. But he would and he can't stop himself from adding it back in.

or

2) He is trying to straddle the issue, hoping that people will hear the part that they want to hear. Examples of that here.

This column, which could be titled, "Whatever your position on Iraq, John Kerry is your man," is dedicated to Sean, a listener who called my radio show the day after the presidential debate. He enabled me to understand why most people believe John Kerry won the debate.

Sean explained that he was an opponent of the war in Iraq and only now could he finally vote for John Kerry. I asked him what Kerry said that confirmed that the Democratic candidate was his man.

Sean: "I believe he has a plan." (Kerry said he has a plan some 12 times.)

Prager: "A plan to do what?"

Sean: "A plan to withdraw our troops."

And then I understood. No matter what position you hold about American foreign
policy and the war in Iraq, John Kerry holds your position.

Sen. Kerry accomplished this so subtly that recognition of it had eluded me.

Yesterday I pointed out the foreign response to Kerry's performance in the debate. Now he is running an ad linking Bush and the Saudi royal family. The Saudis are not pleased not is his goal of energy independence from the Saudis possible.

Has there ever been a candidate whose foreign policy was already in taters before the election?

Farenheit 9/11 comes out today. Do you think that Kerry is trying to tie his campaign in with Michael Moore's film?

With the polls showing the candidates in a statistical dead heat, John Edwards says that half the country must be crazy.

"I'd say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you've lost your mind."

FrontPageMag has an interview with Christopher Hitchens, a former leftist who made an ideological U-turn. He has some interesting observations.

I had to ask myself - is there an international socialist movement worth the name? No. No, there is not. Okay - will it revive? No, it won't. Okay then - but is there at least a critique of capitalism that has a potential for replacing it? Not that I can identify."

"If the answer to all these questions is no, then I have no right to go around calling myself a socialist. It's more like an affectation." But Hitch - there are still hundreds of causes on the left, even if the ?socialist' tag is outdated.

He explains that he believes the moment the Left's bankruptcy became clear was on 9/11. "The United States was attacked by theocratic fascists who represents all the most reactionary elements on earth. They stand for liquidating everything the left has fought for: women's rights, democracy? And how did much of the left respond? By affecting a kind of neutrality between America and the theocratic fascists." He cites the cover of one of Tariq Ali's books as the perfect example. It shows Bush and Bin Laden morphed into one on its cover. "It's explicitly saying they are equally bad. However bad the American Empire has been, it is not as bad as this. It is not the Taliban, and anybody - any movement - that cannot see the difference has lost all moral bearings."

He continues, "I just reject the whole mentality that says, we need to consider this phenomenon in light of current grievances. It's an insult to the people who care about the real grievances of the Palestinians and the Chechens and all the others. It's not just the wrong interpretation of those causes; it's their negation." And this goes for the grievances of the Palestinians, who he has dedicated a great deal of energy to documenting and supporting. "Does anybody really think that if every Jew was driven from Palestine, these guys would go back to their caves? Nobody is blowing themselves up for a two-state solution. They openly say, 'We want a Jew-free Palestine, and a Christian-free Palestine.' And that would very quickly become, 'Don't be a Shia Muslim around here, baby.'" He supports a two-state solution - but he doesn't think it will solve the jihadist problem at all.

He believes neoconservatism is a distinctively new strain of thought, preached by ex-leftists, who believed in using US power to spread democracy. "It's explicitly anti-Kissingerian. Kissinger hates this stuff. He opposed intervening in the Balkans. Kissinger Associates were dead against [the war in] Iraq. He can't understand the idea of backing democracy - it's totally alien to him."

"So that interest in the neocons re-emerged after September 11th. They were saying - we can't carry on with the approach to the Middle East we have had for the past fifty years. We cannot go on with this proxy rule racket, where we back tyranny in the region for the sake of stability. So we have to take the risk of uncorking it and hoping the more progressive side wins." He has replaced a belief in Marxist revolution with a belief in spreading the American revolution. Thomas Jefferson has displaced Karl Marx.

An interesting point here is that Kerry has made several statements in favor of stability, even under a brutal dictator. That makes Kerry the ideological successor of Kissenger.

I only picked a few quotes from the article and, for space, I didn't always include the entire quotes. Read the article.

International Reactions to the Debate.

Kerry keeps saying that he will get new international support for Iraq just by virtue of not being Bush. The French have said that they will not send troops, no matter who is in the White House. What is Kerry's fall-back plan? What will he do about Iraq if he cannot get any other countries to take it over from us? I'd love to hear this in a debate. It doesn't even count as hypothetical.

Presumably Kerry thinks that he can get new allies because he knows how to get along with other countries better than Bush does.

Then there is Kerry's idea of giving nuclear fuel to Iraq in exchange for them shutting down their own enrichment program. This is such a non-starter that they already rejected it.

Foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said it would be "irrational" for Iran to put its nuclear program in jeopardy by relying on supplies from abroad.

"We have the technology (to make nuclear fuel) and there is no need for us to beg from others," Asefi told a weekly news conference.

Does Kerry have a fall-back policy here? Maybe he will use his charm to convince them otherwise just like he will with France.

So how is Kerry the internationalist doing with foreign leaders?

President of Poland Calls Kerry 'Immoral'

Reacting to John Kerry's omission of Polands efforts in Iraq, President of Poland Alexander Kwasniewski said, "I find it kind of sad that a senator with 20 year parliamentary experience is unable to notice the Polish presence in the anti-terror coalition."

When asked about Kerry's derogation of non-U.S. coalition countries fighting in Iraq, Kwasniewski said: "I don't think it's an ignorance. Anti-terror coalition is larger than the USA, the UK and Australia. There are also Poland, Ukraine, and Bulgaria etc. which lost their soldiers there. It's highly immoral not to see our strong commitment we have taken with a strong believe that we must fight against terror together, that we must show our strong international solidarity because Saddam Hussein was dangerous to the world."

"That's why we are disappointed that our stance and ultimate sacrifice of our soldiers are so diminished", President Kwasniewski commented Kerry's speech during the debate.

"Perhaps Mr Kerry, continues Kwasniewski, thinks about the coalition with Germany and France, countries which disagreed with us on Iraq."

Poland has contributed greatly to the efforts in Iraq. Their troop contribution tops 6,500 and 13 have given the ultimate sacrifice, in order to assist the United States liberate Iraq.

What seems to be a poor choice of judgment, Kerry, so far, has not apologized to the nations that he denigrated that have supported America, during these times of challenge.

BritishCombat deaths: 25
Non-combat deaths: 39
Italy 18
Poland 13
Spain 11
Bulgaria 6
Ukraine 6
Slovakia 3
Thailand 2
Portugal 2
Albania 1
Denmark 1
El Salvador 1
Estonia 1
Georgia 1
Latvia: 1

Kerry is still just a candidate and he's already insulted every foreign leader who has ever supported Bush. Just think what he will do if he ever gets into office.

Who's lying? A current Kerry ad says "Bush lost the debate and now he's lying about what Kerry said."

Each cadidate uses part of Kerry's statement. The full quote is:

KERRY: The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control.

No president, though all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you‘re doing what you‘re doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

To simplify: It's not enough that the President justifies preemptive actions to the American people, he also has to justify them to the rest of the world.

This sounds reasonable but what would it mean in practice? Kerry gives this example:

I mean, we can remember when President Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis sent his secretary of state to Paris to meet with DeGaulle. And in the middle of the discussion, to tell them about the missiles in Cuba, he said, “Here, let me show you the photos.” And DeGaulle waved them off and said, “No, no, no, no. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me.

But this is meaningless here. Bush went to the UN and made his case, pointing out how many UN resolutions Saddam had already broken. This was shortly after Afghanistan when the world was still supposed to be with us.

The world has changed since the 1960s. DeGaulle is no longer alive and rather than being grateful to the US, France now sees itself as our main rival for international influence.

Bush asked the UN for a new resolution against Iraq but it never came to a vote because France said that they would veto it. (Because they were being paid off by Iraq with money skimmed from the Oil for Food program.)

So Kerry seems to be saying that he would not have made a preemptive strike until he got a UN resolution which France was blocking. Isn't that the global test he referred to?

Naturally, Kerry only used the first part, not the whole statement.

The first thing that struck me about Kerry in the debate was how good he looked. No one has mentioned Botox but Kerry's forehead never moved. He raised his eyebrows a couple of times and that was it. He was like that during his acceptance speech, too. I think that he gets a Botox treatment just before public appearances in order to look younger. It also makes him look stiff and formal which might be what turned people off during his acceptance speech.

Up until now, whenever Kerry made a lot of appearances his poll ratings would go down. If they go down over the weekend, that will be yet another example. If they go up then he will finally have beaten this problem. If they stay the same if could mean that he won the debate but his personality cost him as many voters as his debating skill gained him. We will see on Monday.

Who won the first debate? At this point, no one knows. In fact, no one can know. Debate winners are decided much later after the returns are in on the election. I keep reading that people listening to the Carter/Reagan debate on the radio thought that Carter won. I was listening on a car radio and I was sure that Reagan won but it didn't become obvious to the MSM (Main Stream Media) until election night.

That doesn't stop the MSM from declaring a winner. In fact, the AP posted a story about Kerry winning before the deviate began. The Daily Show did the same thing Wednesday night as a joke.

I wonder how soon the AP will post a story telling us who won the election?

Kerry needed to accomplish one thing into he debate - he needed to swing enough voters to break ahead of Bush for the first time since the Republican convention. Instant and overnight polls say that he didn't manage this. Bush is still up. From this viewpoint, Kerry lost.

Judging on style, Kerry won. He was sure of himself and on the attack. Bush had long pauses while he collected his words and, at least at one point, referred to our overseas enemies as "folks". The Daily Show pounced on this one. Bush could not attack. He refuses to personally mention Kerry's controversial Viet Nam tour or his disgraceful protest days and it is hard to pin Kerry down on any issues.

On content, it was a lot closer. Kerry referred to a "global test" for future wars. This has to be the UN Security Council which means that he is giving France veto authority. Kerry has denied that he would do this so it is another flip-flop but he ducked the charge by being vague about what "global test" means.

Did I really hear Kerry propose giving rogue nuclear powers fuel and watching to see what they did with it? (Edwards proposed this once but seemed to back off when people's jaws dropped.) The flaws in this are

1) What do you do if the country renigs and locks out your inspectors? This is what North Korea did. They started a nuclear program, we offered an alternative, they kept their weapons program going in secret and now are asking for greater concessions.

2) What if they really want a weapons program? Pakistan felt that they needed to be a nuclear power in order to match India. Iran worries about Israel. North Korea wants to be able to threaten everyone. None of these countries will be bought off with a power plant.

Did I really hear Kerry complain that Bush's talks with North Korea should be unilateral instead of multilateral. Bush's point is that China has leverage that we don't and a greater interest in keeping nukes away from North Korea. Its obvious that Kerry only objects to this because it is Bush's policy.

Kerry announced a new weapons system that he wants to cancel - the nuclear bunker-buster. I can just imagine this staff briefing:

staff member: Sir, we found Osama bin Lauden. He's hiding in some caves near Pakistan.
President Kerry: How can we get him out of there?
staff member: The only thing that could do it is the bunker-buster you cancelled.
Kerry: D'oh!

This was supposed to be the President's strong point, foriegn affairs. I'm not sure how they figured this since most of the questions were about his Iraq policies and those are clearly his weakest spot right now.

In the next debate, I hope that Bush points out that the jobs lost during his term were due to an recession that was already starting when he took office and to the hit from 9/11 and that his policies are turning things around. I also hope that he points out that the tax breaks for off-shoring jobs has been part of the tax code for a long time. Kerry might have even voted for it himself at some point.