The Factor V. The Daily Show

According to Nielsen Media Research viewers of The Daily Show are more likely to have completed four years of college than people who watch "The O'Reilly Factor".

Maybe they're not all "stoned slackers".

The Raging Cajun..

James Carville:

“Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!"

Reality Check part II

Retired Air Force Col. Mike Turner is a former military planner who served on the U.S. Central Command planning staff for operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Before retiring in 1997, he spent four years as a strategic policy planner for the Joint Chiefs of Staff specializing in Middle East/Africa affairs. Here is his latest take on the situation in Iraq,

"From a purely military standpoint, the war in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. This administration failed to make even a cursory effort at adequately defining the political end state they sought to achieve by removing Saddam Hussein, making it impossible to precisely define long-term military success...

...We are nose-deep in a protracted insurgency, an occupying Christian power in an oil-rich, Arab country. That country is not now and has never been a single nation. A single, unified, democratic Iraq comprised of Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis is a willfully ignorant illusion at best...

...To discern the truth about Iraq, Americans must simply look beyond the spin. This war is not some noble endeavor, some great struggle of good against evil as the Bush administration would have us believe. We in the military have heard these grand pronouncements many times before by men who have neither served nor sacrificed. This war is an exercise in colossal stupidity and hubris which has now cost more than 1,000 American military lives, which has empowered Al Qaeda beyond anything those butchers might have engineered on their own and which has diverted America's attention and precious resources from the real threat at the worst possible time. And now, in a supreme act of truly breathtaking gall, this administration insists the only way to fix Iraq is to leave in power the very ones who created the nightmare...

...If the Bush administration remains in power, failure in Iraq is a virtual certainty. "Staying the course" during a crisis spiraling rapidly downward will cost thousands of American and Iraqi lives, will continue to sap the operational readiness of this nation's armed forces, and will continue to strengthen Al Qaeda's hand. To paraphrase FDR, it's time to change horses. The one we're on is about to drown."

Reality Check

Senator Kerry injects this race with a harsh dose of reality...

"Unlike Bush's address to the United Nations the following day, Kerry's speech was light on rhetorical flourishes and abstract ideals, and heavy on facts. The number of Americans dying in Iraq has increased each month since June. The CIA's National Intelligence Estimate directly contradicts Bush's claims about progress in Iraq. The number of attacks against American forces has quadrupled since March. Significant portions of the country have been declared "no-go zones" for Americans because they are controlled by insurgents. Security for Iraqis is worsening. Jobs are scarce. Electricity is rare. "That is the truth," Kerry said flatly. "The truth that the commander-in-chief owes to our troops and the American people."

The President’s response to Senator Kerry,

I paraphrase, "Senator Kerry has flipped-flopped once again, ...Iraqi people desire freedom just like anyone else...everything is much better then the "Liberal Media" is reporting...WE JUST HAVE TO REMAIN OPTIMISTIC..."

Really Mr. Bush...Iraqi people want to be free... that’s astonishing I had no idea...
WHAT the F%$& are you going to do help them become free???

Mr. Bush owes the American people an honest account of the current situation in Iraq. Optimism is an honorable trait when it’s grounded in reality. Unfortunately is seems as though our President is missing the latter.

Flip-Flop or Not?

I wrote this piece a few months ago but it bears repeating,

The Senate vote in October 2002, on a resolution to use force IF necessary against Iraq was largely a symbolic show of support. The Senate wanted to afford President Bush the opportunity to legitimately threaten military force should Iraq refuse the return of weapons inspectors. President Bush himself stated that, "Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable." It means "America speaks with one voice." Certain Senators still felt compelled to state explicit conditions under which they would exclusively approve the use of force against Iraq. Among them was Senator John F. Kerry, who stated this in his floor statement the day of the Senate vote:

"In giving the President this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days--to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, and to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out....

...Let there be no doubt or confusion about where we stand on this. I will support a multilateral effort to disarm him by force, if we ever exhaust all other options, as the President has promised, but I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible under any circumstances.

An administration which made nation building a dirty word needs to develop a comprehensive, Marshall-type plan, if it will meet the challenge. The President needs to give the American people a fairer and fuller, clearer understanding of the magnitude and long-term financial cost of that effort...

As the President made clear earlier this week, "Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable." It means "America speaks with one voice."In voting to grant the President the authority, I am not giving him carte blanche to run roughshod over every country that poses or may pose some kind of potential threat to the United States. Every nation has the right to act preemptively, if it faces an imminent and grave threat, for its self-defense under the standards of law. The threat we face today with Iraq does not meet that test yet..."

Less then a month after the Senate approved the threat of force, the Bush administration drafted Resolution 1441. Its chief goal, to get weapons inspectors back into Iraq, was stated clearly throughout the document. Upon this premise the Security Council voted unanimously in support of the resolution. But in a strange development, Iraq actually accepted the conditions placed upon them in Resolution 1441 and weapons inspectors returned to Iraq. Almost immediately the administration began to question the credibility of reports from the weapons inspectors while simultaneously transporting thousands of troops to the Iraqi border. Iraq then refused to allow inspectors access to presidential palaces, and began to waffle on other conditions specified within the resolution. But weapons inspectors insisted they needed more time to thoroughly evaluate the WMD capacity of Iraq. Hans Blix pleaded with the United Nations, citing real progress in their work; he claimed U.S. estimates of weapons programs within Iraq were unrealistic and unfounded. The Bush administration was undeterred, and America was set on a course for war.

Did President Bush's preemptive attack on Iraq meet the standards for military intervention that Senator Kerry specified in his floor statement before the vote? Had President Bush exhausted all options available to him? Should he have given the inspectors more time to evaluate Iraq's weapons capability? Did the President prepare and present an effective plan to govern post-war Iraq? Was a multi-lateral effort proven impossible under any circumstances? Did Iraq pose an imminentnent and grave threat that would have justified a preemptive military strike?

No. No. Yes. No. No. And No.

Can Senator Kerry legitimately criticize the way in which the President took our nation to war even though he voted for the resolution to use force if necessary?

Yes absolutely.

Did he flip-flop on the war? I report you decide.

Stewart on the FACTOR!

This is how O'Reilly starts off his interview with The Daily Show's Jon Stewart,

O'REILLY: You know what's really frightening?...You actually have an influence on this presidential election. That is scary...

STEWART: If that were so, that would be quite frightening.

O'REILLY: But it is. It's true. I mean, you've got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night, OK, and they can vote.

What planet is O'Reilly living on, "stoned slackers"???

Stewart's witty retort,

STEWART: Yeah, I just don't know how motivated they would be, these stoned slackers.

To which O'Reilly somehow came up with this whopper?

O'REILLY: Come on, you do the research, you know the research on your program...Eighty-seven percent are intoxicated when they watch it. You didn't see that?


FOR THE RECORD...I have never once watched the Daily Show intoxicated. But I would like to know what O'Reilly has been smoking lately.


Another hilarious bit,

STEWART: When you say younger, are you talking 9, 10? What are you talking here?

O'REILLY: No, I'm talking 18 to 25, you know. The people who are on your intellectual level.

The Problem with Polls

This Washington Monthly article gives a brief explanation of the huge discrepancy in polls today,

ARG has finished their massive nationwide poll of 600 people in each state (plus DC), a total of 30,600 respondents. Here are the basic results:

Nationwide, Bush leads Kerry 47% to 46%.

Kerry has the lead in 20 states with 270 electoral votes.

Bush has the lead in 29 states with 253 electoral votes.

Two states are tied (Wisconsin and West Virginia).

In a poll this large, there's essentially no margin of error in the national number, which leads Robert Waldman to wonder why other pollsters don't also use larger samples to eliminate (almost all) sampling error:

I think pollsters use small samples only partly to save money, and also to give themselves an excuse if their numbers are off. With a huge sample, a difference between the poll and the election would imply a more worrisome problem, either a biased sample, a faulty likely voter filter or a psychological difference between talking to a pollster and actually voting. It is clear that some or all sampling techniques give biased samples, because the spread of polls is too large to explain with sampling error alone. Polling agencies certainly don't want to spend money to prove that they are one of the agencies with a defective sampling technique.

He may be right. Sampling error is real, but it's not what's at fault for the huge disparities we're seeing lately, with polls taken on the same day sometimes varying by as much as 10 points or more. The real problem is the weighting formulas used by the different polling firms.
And as near as I can tell, it's only going to get worse. I've been reading for years that truly random telephone polling is getting harder and harder for a variety of reasons: cell phone proliferation, caller ID, fewer people willing to talk to pollsters, etc. This makes raw calling samples more and more distorted and puts an increasing burden on weighting models that correct the sample to more accurately reflect the actual electorate.

And that's not all. Add to this various formulas for deciding who's a likely voter and who's not, and what gets reported in the daily paper is becoming more algorithm than it is real data. What's more, calling more people won't help. If there's a systematic bias in the sample, it's going to be there regardless of the sample size.

What we're seeing this year may be the Cheynes-Stokes breathing of traditional polling models, and by 2008 the whole enterprise may either be dead or changed beyond recognition. In the meantime, though, we have the worst of all worlds: we're still relying on traditional polls even though the sample distortion is too large to be massaged away with fancy software, but we don't have new polling models to replace them yet.

In other words, we don't really know who's winning. Election day may turn out to be a real surprise."

Polls Polls and more Polls

New Zogby Poll on Septmeber 19, has Bush at 46 and Kerry at 43.

Kerry is still very much in this race, pundits who say otherwise are fools.

Too little too late...

For all you conservatives out their that still give any credence to the Swift Boat Smears for George Bush, please read the following article written by Nicholas D. Kristof,

"Did Mr. Kerry get his first Purple Heart for a self-inflicted wound? That's the accusation of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who say that the injury came (unintentionally) from a grenade that Mr. Kerry himself fired at Viet Cong. In fact, nobody knows where the shrapnel came from, and it's possible that the critics are right. It's not certain that the Viet Cong were returning fire. But the only other American on the boat in a position to see anything, Bill Zaldonis (who says he voted for Mr. Bush in 2000) told me, "He was hurt, and I don't think it was self-inflicted."

Did Mr. Kerry deserve his second and third Purple Hearts? There's not much dispute that the second was merited. As for the third one, the Swift Boat Veterans' claim that he received it for a minor injury he got while blowing up food supplies to keep them from the enemy. But documents and witness accounts show that he received a shrapnel wound when South Vietnamese troops blew up rice stores, and an injured arm in a mine explosion later that day.

Did Mr. Kerry deserve his Bronze Star? Yes. The Swift Boat Veterans claim that he was not facing enemy fire when he rescued a Green Beret, Jim Rassmann, but that is contradicted by those were there, like William Rood and Mr. Rassmann (a Republican). In fact, Mr. Rassmann recommended Mr. Kerry for a Silver Star.

Did Mr. Kerry deserve his Silver Star? Absolutely. He earned it for responding to two separate ambushes in a courageous and unorthodox way, by heading straight into the gunfire. Then he pursued one armed fighter into the jungle and shot him dead. According to Fred Short, a machine gunner who saw the event, the fighter was an adult (not the half-naked teenager cited by the Swift Boat Veterans) who was preparing to launch a grenade at the boat. "Kerry went into harm's way to save the lives of the guys on the boat," Mr. Short told me. "If he hadn't done that, I am absolutely positive I would not be here today." Mr. Kerry's commander said he had wanted to give him an even higher honor, the Navy Cross, but thought it would take too long to process.

What do those who served with him say? Some who served on other boats have called Mr. Kerry a hypochondriac self-promoter. But every enlisted man who was with Mr. Kerry on various boats when he won Purple Hearts and Silver and Bronze Stars says he deserved them. All praise his courage and back his candidacy. "I was there for two of the Purple Hearts and the Bronze and Silver Stars, and he earned every one of them," said Delbert Sandusky, in a typical comment. "He saved our lives."

The bottom line? Mr. Kerry has stretched the truth here and there, but earned his decorations. And the Swift Boat Veterans, contradicted by official records and virtually everyone who witnessed the incidents, are engaging in one of the ugliest smears in modern U.S. politics."

The fact that it took Kristof months to decipher this is a bit disconcerting, better late then never I guess. I also think he is dead on in stating that this will go down as one of the trashiest smears in American politics.

But just in case anyone had any ligering doubts, please read the following Reuters release,

"The U.S. Navy (news - web sites) on Friday rejected a legal watchdog group's request to open an investigation into military awards given to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry (news - web sites) during the Vietnam War, saying his medals were properly approved.

"Our examination found that existing documentation regarding the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart medals indicates the awards approval process was properly followed," the Navy's inspector general, Vice Admiral Ronald Route, said in a memo written to Navy Secretary Gordon England.

"In particular, the senior officers who awarded the medals were properly delegated authority to do so. In addition, we found that they correctly followed the procedures in place at the time for approving these awards."

Of course, this won't recieve half the press that all the smears got. It must be that damn liberal media.

Bush on the Trail...

Great article. GO READ IT!

Curious George

The Washington Monthy latest take on the Bush National Guard story...everyone read this for the facts.

"BUSH AND THE MEMOS....One of the reasons I'm annoyed by the whole Killian memo fiasco is that even if they're real they don't really add much to the story. After all, here's what we already know:

Former Texas Speaker of the House Ben Barnes pulled strings in 1968 to get George Bush into the National Guard so that he could avoid the draft. This isn't something Barnes just cooked up recently for Dan Rather, either. He testified under oath about it five years ago.

In early 1972, with two years still left on Bush's Guard commitment, something happened. Nobody knows what happened, but for some reason he started flying again in training jets that he had graduated from two years previously; he began putting in simulator time; he had trouble making landings; and in April 1972 he made his last flight. He then refused to take his required annual physical and was subsequently grounded.

In May 1972, Bush left for Alabama and disappeared from the Guard. He showed up for no drills for the next five months, and, contrary to White House statements, he never made up these missed drills.

Bush returned to Texas in late 1972, but in May 1973 his superior officers in Houston (one of whom was the now famous Jerry Killian) refused to rate Bush, saying he "has not been observed at this unit" for the past 12 months.

Oddly, though, official payroll records show that Bush was getting paid for attending drills during this period. The problem is that the payroll records documenting his attendance are completely screwy: Bush is credited for the wrong kind of attendance on some dates, he's given the wrong number of points for others, and weekday duty is frequently confused with weekend duty. What's more, even when you add all this up, Bush's attendance still didn't meet minimum National Guard standards.

The combination of these two things bears all the marks of someone backdating payroll records but doing a sloppy job. The likeliest explanation is that in mid-1973, after his superiors refused to rate him, someone pulled some strings and a bunch of payroll records were submitted for the previous year. However, the person who did it just checked off a few days for each month, instead of carefully making sure that the dates and duty types actually matched up the way they would if they were real.

In October 1973 Bush was discharged from the Texas ANG and moved to Boston to attend Harvard Business School. Although the Bush campaign said in 1999 that Bush transferred to a unit in Boston to finish up his service, they now admit that isn't true. Bush never signed up with a unit in Boston and never again attended drills.

There are plenty more reasons to be skeptical about Bush's National Guard service, but leave those aside for the moment. What we know for sure is that Bush began having problems flying in 1972; refused his physical; was grounded; disappeared for five months; probably disappeared for an entire year; failed to sign up with a unit in Boston for his final year of service; and got an honorable discharge anyway.

And he's never come clean about it. We don't need CBS's memos to remind us of that. We already knew it."

For anyone who disagree's with the stated facts, read the links and check the sources!!!

Fiscal Conservative

The Washington Post reported yesterday that,

"The expansive agenda President Bush laid out at the Republican National Convention was missing a price tag, but administration figures show the total is likely to be well in excess of $3 trillion over a decade.

A staple of Bush's stump speech is his claim that his Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry, has proposed $2 trillion in long-term spending, a figure the Massachusetts senator's campaign calls exaggerated. But the cost of the new tax breaks and spending outlined by Bush at the GOP convention far eclipses that of the Kerry plan."

Bush is going to successfully bankrupt America if he is re-elected. Three cheers for fiscal responsibility.

Sometimes it amazes me how quickly the right abandoned one of the core principles of their party to support our current president. I guess that is partisanship for you.

Who's winning the war on terror?

Juan Cole is a professor of History at the University of Michigan, on September 11th he discussed the progress or lack of progress America has made in the "war on terror",

"...al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron. Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United States and American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe oppression of the Palestinians. Another goal is to destroy the US economy, so weakening it that it cannot prevent the emergence of the Islamic superpower.

Al-Qaeda wanted to build enthusiasm for the Islamic superstate among the Muslim populace, to convince ordinary Muslims that the US could be defeated and they did not have to accept the small, largely secular, and powerless Middle Eastern states erected in the wake of colonialism.

Bin Laden hoped the US would timidly withdraw from the Middle East. But he appears to have been aware that an aggressive US response to 9/11 was entirely possible. In that case, he had a Plan B: al-Qaeda hoped to draw the US into a debilitating guerrilla war in Afghanistan and do to the US military what they had earlier done to the Soviets. Al-Zawahiri's recent message shows that he still has faith in that strategy.

The US cleverly outfoxed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, using air power and local Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) to destroy the Taliban without many American boots on the ground. Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they had avoided in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate Bin Laden's wisdom and foresightedness.

After the Iraq War, Bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush even in a significantly secular Muslim country such as Turkey. This is a bizarre finding, a weird turn of events. Turks didn't start out with such an attitude. It grew up in reaction against US policies.

It remains to be seen whether the US will be forced out of Iraq the way it was forced out of Iran in 1979. If so, as al-Zawahiri says, that will be a huge victory. A recent opinion poll did find that over 80 percent of Iraqis want an Islamic state. If Iraq goes Islamist, that will be the biggest victory the movement has had since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. An Islamist Iraq might well be able ultimately to form a joint state with Syria, starting the process of the formation of the Islamic superstate of which Bin Laden dreams.

In Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda has emerged as a dissident political party. Before it had just been a small group of Bin Laden's personal acolytes in Afghanistan and a handful of other countries. Although the United States and its Pakistani ally have captured significant numbers of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a whole new generation of angry young Muslim men has been produced. Al-Qaeda has moved from being a concrete cell-based terrorist organization to being an ideal and a model, for small local groups in Casablanca, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and elsewhere.

The US is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the US has of its."


SIDE NOTE:

I've said it before and I will say it again, but I am so damn sick of hearing politicians, mainly conservatives, state that Al Qaeda attacked us on 9-11 because they hate our freedom. I think Pat Buchanan said it best when he stated that Bin Laden doesn't hate our freedom, he didn't suddenly run across the Bill of Rights in Kabul and decide to attack the United States, it is our actions and foreign policy in the Middle East over the last century that Bin Laden takes issue with. By failing to understand our enemy we only put oursleves at greater risk of attack.

This elementary view of our enemies goals and motivation is dangerous political rhetoric because it fails to grasp the nature of the threat we face.

Iraq Reality Check

Newsweek paints a grim picture on the ground in Iraq,

"It's not only that U.S. casualty figures keep climbing. American counterinsurgency experts are noticing some disturbing trends in those statistics. The Defense Department counted 87 attacks per day on U.S. forces in August--the worst monthly average since Bush's flight-suited visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. Preliminary analysis of the July and August numbers also suggests that U.S. troops are being attacked across a wider area of Iraq than ever before. And the number of gunshot casualties apparently took a huge jump in August. Until then, explosive devices and shrapnel were the primary cause of combat injuries, typical of a "phase two" insurgency, where sudden ambushes are the rule. (Phase one is the recruitment phase, with most actions confined to sabotage. That's how things started in Iraq.) Bullet wounds would mean the insurgents are standing and fighting--a step up to phase three.

Another ominous sign is the growing number of towns that U.S. troops simply avoid. A senior Defense official objects to calling them "no-go areas." "We could go into them any time we wanted," he argues. The preferred term is "insurgent enclaves." They're spreading. Counterinsurgency experts call it the "inkblot strategy": take control of several towns or villages and expand outward until the areas merge. The first city lost to the insurgents was Fallujah, in April. Now the list includes the Sunni Triangle cities of Ar Ramadi, Baqubah and Samarra, where power shifted back and forth between the insurgents and American-backed leaders last week. "There is no security force there [in Fallujah], no local government," says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad. "We would get attacked constantly. Forget about it."

Vietnam.....again

New developments in Bush's National Guard records are being reported by the AP this morning. Kevin Drum has the latest,

"NATIONAL GUARD UPDATE....The National Guard story has suddenly burst back on the scene. Here's the latest:

Nick Kristof devoted his entire column today to Bush's missing months in Alabama during 1972. Bush has always maintained that he trained with the 187th Air National Guard Tactical squadron at Dannelly Air National Guard base while he was in Alabama, but the 187th was a small unit and Kristof quotes Bob Mintz, a fighter pilot in the 187th during 1972, who says that Bush was never there.

Kristof also links to a lengthy analysis of Bush's National Guard service by retired Col. Gerald Lechliter. Lechliter charges that Bush received credit (and pay) for drills that he shouldn't have.

The Boston Globe, based partly on Lechliter's document, reports this morning that Bush failed to meet his training requirements twice during his duty with the National Guard: first in 1972 when he was in Alabama, and second in 1974 when he was attending Harvard Business School. In 1999, Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett said that Bush trained with a Boston unit while he was at Harvard, but the Globe quotes Bartlett as admitting now that "I must have misspoke."

A new story from the Associated Press reports that the Defense Department, after receiving a FOIA request from AP, has mysteriously located some additional Bush records. For the most part the records don't have anything new, but one of them casts some additional light on the training Bush missed with his regular unit in Houston: "Significantly, it showed the unit joined a '24-hour active alert mission to safeguard against surprise attack' in the southern United State beginning on Oct. 6, 1972, a time when Bush did not report for duty, according to his pay records."

And of course 60 Minutes II will have its interview with Ben Barnes tonight. Barnes will be telling the story of how he pulled strings to get Bush into the National Guard back in 1968.
What goes around comes around. As I mentioned before, I doubt that this debate is good for the country, but apparently a lot of people figure that if the Swift Boat group can make up smear stories about John Kerry's military service with impunity, then it's fair to retaliate with true stories about Bush's. I can't say that I blame them."

Scare Tactics...

Our Vice President Dick Cheney stated this today, "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States..."

So if you vote for John Kerry, America will suffer a devastating attack....???

This is repulisive...



"2 MORE MONTHS!!! 2 MORE MONTHS!!!! 2 MORE MONTHS!!!!"

-Wheeler

Read this...

If you want a detailed account of all the half-truths, lies, and distortions that Republicans stated about John Kerry's record, take a read.

More Zell...

The National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru stated this about Zell Miller's Keynote address,

"I don't think we've ever really gotten an adequate explanation from the senator for the startling turn in his politics over the last four years. It would be one thing to leave the Democratic party because it's left you, and the South, in 1975 or 1985. But to (essentially) leave it in early 2001, years and years and years after McGovern, suggests a little slowness on the uptake.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I think that parts of Miller's speech are going to be hard for Republicans to defend. I know that Miller explicitly denied he was questioning the Democrats' patriotism. But he did pretty much say, in the passage about the 1940 election, that the Democrats were hurting the country by running a presidential campaign. And deliberately putting their own party's interests ahead of the nation. The occupier/liberator distinction he drew was also a stretch. We've plainly been both occupiers and liberators, and Democrats have not been especially keen to claim otherwise (even if they do not stress Bush's accomplishment in liberating Iraq)."

Finally, an honest take on the speech from a conservative.

Over-Zellous!!!

Republican key note speaker Zell Miller:

"Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrat's manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief...Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator

...In their warped way of thinking, America is the problem, not the solution. They don't believe there's any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy..."

Democratic key note speaker Barak Obama:

"The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."

Notice a difference. I do.

I have never seen a more vitriolic speech given by any politician in my life. Never. Not Howard Dean, not Pat Buchanan, not anyone. Zell takes the cake. His tirade will go down in history, and mark my words will be remembered as the turning point in this campaign. I don't care what the immediate polls say, the Republicans unnerving malice and hatred directed at the patriotism of the Democratic party will backfire in a major way. You heard it here first.

Those are my feelings, here's what some of the pundits had to say about it,

Joe Klein:

"The whole week was double-ply, wall-to-wall ugly. The tone was set early on ... Allowances should be made for rhetorical excess ... But, even so, the Republican Party reached an unimaginably slouchy, and brazen, and constant, level of mendacity last week ... [President Bush] is in "campaign mode" now, which means mendacity doesn't matter, aggression is all and wall-to-wall ugly is the order of battle for the duration."

William Saletan:

"If the convention speeches are any guide, Republicans have run out of excuses for blowing the economy, blowing the surplus, and blowing our military resources and moral capital in the wrong country. So they're going after the patriotism of their opponents."

Howard Kurtz:

"What should the press do when a convention speaker stands up and hurls charges that are somewhere between exaggerated and false?

It's a party gathering, after all, and red-meat rhetoric is always on the menu...But isn't it part of the journalistic mission to provide a reality check?
(Speaking of that, the convention is three days old and I've heard almost nothing about improving the economy from the prime-time speakers. Does complaining make me an economic girlie man?)"

The American Prospect:

"So this is the convention that was going to be forward-looking and outline specific policies, huh? The only specific policy that emerged from Dick Cheney’s acceptance speech and Zell Miller’s keynote address last night was libel.
If Cheney’s slanders seem subdued, even by his normally Prozacked standards, that’s because Zell Miller’s rant was still echoing in the halls. The Bushes always contract out their hits, but I don’t think anyone had quite been prepared for Miller’s synthesis of Joe McCarthy and the Grand Inquisitor."

U-G-L-Y!!! UGLY!

RNC

What I said, but better. Here's the Post's Dana Milibank on the speeches at the Republican National Convention,

"The theme of the Republican convention on Wednesday night, as on the previous two nights, was unmistakable: Be afraid of terrorists, and be very afraid of John F. Kerry's ability to fight the terrorists.

On a day when the official theme was economic opportunity, Sen. Zell Miller (Ga.), the keynote speaker, made no mention of the economy. Instead, he delivered a derisive indictment of the Democratic presidential nominee, saying Kerry would arm the military with "spitballs" and "outsource our national security" to Paris.

Vice President Cheney, in his speech Wednesday night, devoted fewer than 100 of his nearly 2,700 words to the economy, instead launching an extended attack on Kerry's ability to fight terrorists. Saying Kerry wants to show al Qaeda "our softer side,"

...Even given the political imperative, the convention's focus on terrorism -- and the charge that Kerry is ill-equipped to combat it -- has been intense. The party has gone through three hours of prime-time speeches with barely a mention of the economy, passing reference to domestic policies, and no specific discussion of Bush's agenda for a second term...

...Miller and Cheney reached deep into Kerry's past to present him as a danger to Americans' security -- at times mischaracterizing the Democrat's positions in the process. "Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations," Miller said. Cheney, in turn, said Kerry "began his political career by saying he would like to see our troops deployed 'only at the directive of the United Nations.' " The vice president said, "Kerry denounces American action when other countries don't approve -- as if the whole object of our foreign policy were to please a few persistent critics."

Both men apparently were referring to a 1970 interview Kerry gave to the Harvard Crimson. In his speech accepting his party's nomination in July, Kerry said: "I will never give any nation or any institution a veto over our national security."

Miller portrayed Kerry as "an auctioneer selling off our national security." He recited a long list of weapons systems he said Kerry opposed. Miller's list was mostly derived from a single Kerry vote against a spending bill in 1991, rather than individual votes against particular systems. The bill was also opposed by five Republican senators at the time, and Cheney, who was defense secretary then, was demanding even deeper cuts in defense spending by Congress."

And here is Andrew Sullivan, a Republican blogger discussing the differences between the DNC and the RNC,

"Zell Miller's address will, I think, go down as a critical moment in this campaign, and maybe in the history of the Republican party. I kept thinking of the contrast with the Democrats' keynote speaker, Barack Obama, a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American, speaking about national unity and uplift. Then you see Zell Miller, his face rigid with anger, his eyes blazing with years of frustration as his Dixiecrat vision became slowly eclipsed among the Democrats...The man's speech was not merely crude; it added whole universes to the word crude."

RNC Summary

Initial thoughts:

If I have time today, I’m going to tear through all the lies and half-truths that were stated last night about Senator Kerry's record. Two off the top of my head.

1. Cheney's claim that Senator Kerry would only approve force if the United Nations approved the use is patently false. If Cheney had watched Kerry's acceptance speech or any other speech Kerry has given on national security, he would have seen Senator Kerry explicitly state the exact opposite of what the Vice-President was indicating.

2. Cheney's claim that Kerry will only use force after we are attacked, once again DICK, you might want to read over any one of Senator Kerry's stump speeches or his DNC speech. THEY ALL STATE THE OPPOSITE.

Plenty more where that came from.

Even though Cheney's speech was filled with inaccuracies, his delivery and much of the text will be very effective. I find fault with his substance, but as a political tool, his speech was first rate.

ZELL.....where do i even start. hahaha...Remember when everyone said the Democratic convention would be hate filled, nasty, and angry. Well they got an angry Democrat alright, but he happens to be the keynote speaker for the Republican National Convention. Who coincidentally challenged Chris Mathews to a duel last night on national television. After watching two interviews with Miller last night, I have come to the conclusion that he is 100% completely off his rocker. He's lost it.... MORE ON ALL THIS LATER! I will also try and find a link to the interviews so you can judge for yourself.

ONE MORE THING! Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough made a great point on Hardball last night, that this Republican convention is ALL about John Kerry, not about the achievements of this administration. Could Dick Cheney even list one domestic achievement that this administration has accomplished in the last four years?? ONE!!! All the speakers have done is attack John Kerry and speculate on how he will LOSE the war on terror. Republicans have realized that they have such an abysmal record governing that their only chance to defeat Kerry is to distort his record and attack his character. Cheney, Miller, and unfortunately even Giuliani stooped to this level. What about an agenda for the next four years????????? NOTHING!!!! The Republicans have offered 0....a big donut. It amazes me, simply amazes me. So far this convention has been what everyone feared the Democratic Convention would be, ONE BIG HATE FEST!!!

Its days like this, that I am so proud to be a Democrat.

And those.....TWINS!!

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet....you need to go check out the most uncomfortable moment on live television from this years campaign season. Go watch the Bush's twins from last night's convention. It is unbelievable....Who in their right mind let them give this speech??

Here's the link.

This is what conservative's on FOX NEWS said right after, needless to say...they were the most forgiving. Imagine what those babarians at CNN said..

Bill Kristol: "The last half hour did not help, as far as I can tell, Bush's campaign for reelection."

Mort Kondracke: "Those two girls were ditzes. I'm surprised they were allowed on the program."

Fred Barnes: "I think she [Laura] had no place up there or the daughters either....Their mother said they'll be pursuing their own careers. I would advise them to look in some field other than comedy."

And here's what conservative columnist Howard Kurtz wrote in today's Washington Post,

"I don't want to be unfair to Jenna and Barbara. Growing up in a fishbowl isn't easy.
But to paraphrase what Jay Leno said to Hugh Grant after his little escapade with a street hooker: What the hell were they thinking?

And what was the person who vetted their speech thinking? Sex jokes about former first lady Barbara Bush? I've been covering conventions a long time, and this might have been the weirdest moment since George McGovern gave his acceptance speech at 3 a.m. I mean, it looked like a video you would make in your basement, and then show only to your closest friends. To judge by the reaction of the scribes around me, already pumped up by Arnold, it was cringe-inducing. Maybe they were trying to appeal to the Paris Hilton crowd. Imus says he took his hearing aid out until the twins had left the stage."

Damn. Thats just plain rough....Check out the video, it is down right hilarious!