Wonderful news. Exactly the two issues that I think are very effective against Bush: he is a lying weasel and totally incompetent. I think some of the ads should be timelines showing his failures at business including that lovely one of getting fired from the Carlyle board and then adding to his record of driving Texas into the brink and now the inability to even realize they should at least plan a little bit for the aftermath of their war. I think the stories about how they screwed up with Iraq will be very potent.

New slogan: We can't afford a C class student President when our problems need an A class solution.

Can you beleive Denny Hasterrt, 3rd in line to the "throne"....? It was Clinton's fault. I read that in my morning paper today and laughed out loud. He said something to the effect that Clinton's people stopped relying on shady individuals and human rights abusers as sources for information and this had caused the intelligence community to have unreliable evidence and caused a decline in intelligence,
and now that they were back to using shady human rights abusers, they were getting better intelligence...

what a nimrod! right on Steve!

I find it interesting to contrast the Trent Lott affair with the Iraq situation in terms of the effect of the blogosphere. Trent Lott's comments and past were exposed and he fell, in large part because blogs like Josh Marshall's were joined by Sullivan and Instapundit, so the truth came out and the mainstream media had no choice but to pick it up. The same truths were out about Iraq -- I remember RonZ's point by point rebuttal of Powell's speech -- but the Sullivans and Instapundits were pushing in the other direction, and the lefty bloggers were alone. (Though it's worse than that -- the Iraq truths were in mainstream media -- e.g., the story about the CIA's estimate of an increase in terror risk in the event of war. But the lies, e.g., in the SOTU, overwhelmed the truth.)

The claim by rethuglicans about using Clinton's 1998 intelligence as the basis for justifying Bush's war in 2003 was rebutted easily by Wesley Clark during his MTP interview. Remember Operation Desert Fox, that was the basis for over 400 missile strikes against Iraq.

The Noose Tightens
Of course, like so much else, the information below was available well before going to war. But as the administration gets increasingly entangled in its cover-up, the al Qaeda story will be something to watch, along with the uranium and the 45 minute falsehoods. This op-ed piece from yesterday is important because of where it appeared and because of who wrote it.

The Next Debate: Al Qaeda Link
By DANIEL BENJAMIN and STEVEN SIMON
NYT July 20, 2003

In all the debate over the disputed claims in President Bush's State of the Union address, we must not forget to scrutinize an equally important, and equally suspect, reason given by the administration for toppling Saddam Hussein: Iraq's supposed links to terrorists. ...

But the connection the administration asserted between Iraq and Al Qaeda ... seems more uncertain than ever. ...

As members of the National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999, we closely examined nearly a decade's worth of intelligence and we became convinced, like many of our colleagues in the intelligence community, that the religious radicals of Al Qaeda and the secularists of Baathist Iraq simply did not trust one another or share sufficiently compelling interests to work together.

But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised that the Bush administration had "bulletproof evidence" of a Qaeda-Iraq link, and Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar case to the United Nations. Such claims now look as questionable as the allegation that Iraq was buying uranium in Niger.

The Noose Tightens
Of course, like so much else, the information below was available well before going to war. But as the administration gets increasingly entangled in its cover-up, the al Qaeda story will be something to watch, along with the uranium and the 45 minute falsehoods. This op-ed piece from yesterday is important because of where it appeared and because of who wrote it.

The Next Debate: Al Qaeda Link
By DANIEL BENJAMIN and STEVEN SIMON
NYT July 20, 2003

In all the debate over the disputed claims in President Bush's State of the Union address, we must not forget to scrutinize an equally important, and equally suspect, reason given by the administration for toppling Saddam Hussein: Iraq's supposed links to terrorists. ...

But the connection the administration asserted between Iraq and Al Qaeda ... seems more uncertain than ever. ...

As members of the National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999, we closely examined nearly a decade's worth of intelligence and we became convinced, like many of our colleagues in the intelligence community, that the religious radicals of Al Qaeda and the secularists of Baathist Iraq simply did not trust one another or share sufficiently compelling interests to work together.

But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised that the Bush administration had "bulletproof evidence" of a Qaeda-Iraq link, and Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar case to the United Nations. Such claims now look as questionable as the allegation that Iraq was buying uranium in Niger.

WRP Leads the Way: The C-Word Appears
As I have previously suggested, the word that will most serve to damage the administration’s credibility is cover-up.

The Crime and the Cover-Up
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 21 July 2003

The scandal axiom in Washington states that it is not the crime that destroys you, but the cover-up. Today in Washington you can hear terms like 'Iraqgate' and 'Weaponsgate' bandied about, but such obtuse labels do not provide an explanation for the profound movements that are taking place.

Clearly, there is a scandal brewing over the Iraq war and the Bush administration claims of Iraqi weapons arsenals that led to the shooting. Clearly, there is a cover-up taking place. Yet this instance, the crimes that have led to the cover-up are worse by orders of magnitude than the cover-up itself.

In Search of the C-word, Again
Something to Hide?
By David Ignatius
Washington Post
Friday, July 18, 2003; Page A19

The author wonders whatever happened to two key actors: (1) Amir Saadi, Saddam Hussein's science adviser, who surrendered voluntarily to U.S. authorities in Baghdad on April 12 and (2) Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, who turned himself in April 24.

What's bothersome about these cases is that they reinforce the impression that the Bush administration has something to hide. Why not disclose the testimony of people the coalition worked so hard to catch? The only convincing explanation, argues a former CIA official, is that their accounts would "directly refute the Bush administration's insistence that WMD still exist somewhere -- an assertion that we all know is growing more questionable every day."

Keep this in mind as we wait for the “October Surprise” report from David Kay, which in all likelihood will purport that documents have been found proving the existence of WMD “programs” in Iraq.

www.cnn.com

Cnn poll right now:

Is President Bush doing a good job?

GO!

If integrity is the only characteristic Bush has ever had to make voters lean his way, what could he possibly come up with in less than a year's time to replace it with that would seem credible? [mangled sentence/off]