I blame Bush ;)

Hm. What will David Kay say? ;)

Not bad; it only took them all week to come up with a cover story.

Truly beautiful. They let the idiot talk about it for 5 days, even cut a commercial then pull the rug out from under him. The only way to refute it is to call the soldiers liars, which given his pathology is certainly possible in his quest to never be wrong.

If John Kerry had been President, he'd have known that the U.S. military removed the explosives, and would have been able to defend himself more quickly during his re-election campaign.

The only way to refute it is to call the soldiers liars, which given his pathology is certainly possible in his quest to never be wrong.

See the comment immediately above yours; it's already being done. It's apparently the meme-du-jour, since I've seen similar comments elsewhere.

If John Kerry had been President, Saddam would still have the explosives.

-rightonamerica

I've got it!

If John Kerry Had been president, he would have stopped those explosives from falling into the wrong hands, Ours!

heh

You know, someday we are going to find out that John Kerry was really a deep-cover Republican agent the whole time, whose mission was to get Bush re-elected. Sometimes there's no other possible explanation.

Pick a story, any story.

"Major Austin Pearson appeared at a Pentagon news conference to say it was his mission to go the facility and clear explosives from the base.
...
President Bush says the explosives were possibly removed by Saddam's forces before the invasion.
...
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld entered the debate Thursday, suggesting the 377 tons of explosives were taken away before U.S. forces arrived, saying any large effort to loot the material afterward would have been detected.
...
The Washington Times on Thursday quoted John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, who said he believed Russian special-forces personnel, working with Iraqi intelligence, 'almost certainly' removed the high-explosive material from the Al-Qaqaa facility." FOXNews.com

Robert Crawford,

Absolutely right.
John Kerry may very well be a pathological liar.

But we can't know for sure because the MSM is not asking questions.
But since this guy wont sign the 180 form we can only conlude that there are lots more skeletons in his closet.

It's really a shame that due to MSM bias an an absolutely unprecedented level we hardly know anything about the Democratic candidate for president.

"Not bad; it only took them all week to come up with a cover story."

Actually, they waited the week out before firing a head shot into the story. Waited while Kerry slopped around trying to equate a specific ground operation as Bush's responsibility. All the while being interpreted as maligning the troops instead, and all based on story where both the details and the rationale for publishing it without adequately fact checking those details were questionable from the start.

I'd call it a savyy move from the administration. Let Kerry look about as poor a choice for CinC all week with his total lack of understanding (actually purposeful misrepresentation) of the the ground war. Then shoot down the story on friday with the account of a soldier with direct knowledge that Kerry would have to be insane to call a liar (he will though).

Both Atios and Kos and their goblins were besides themselves with glee yesterday over the photos that proved nothing directly about anything. Breaking out the champagne over the incipient Kerry landslide as one moonbat put it. They were hugging themselves over the overwhelming October surprise that would sink Bush for something he could not be held directly responsible for and despite all the evidence all week that Kerry was out of his mind to run with it.

The bats in the belfry crowd are already claiming the Pentagon is lying about a story that wasn't hurting Bush no matter how hard the MSM pushed it. The Kosites and Atriettes will be the last to grasp that just as they were the last to admit the Rather memos were phoney.

I expect they will run with something about Haliburton the next couple of days.

Overtaken by other comments while I typed I see.

I have been continually astonished the past two weeks at the extent that Kerry has moved to relying on the most batshit memes of the left. It seems to me that he must have read the writing on the wall and only wants to go down appearing to fight the good fight to the folks who believe those memes regardless of any common sense test and keep the ABB crowd and 40%.

I said here two weeks ago that I believed even then that Bush was leading by double digits nationally, and though the public polls were not capturing that the campaign internals were. At this point, I actually thing Bush may get over a 15% margin in the popular vote and make any challenge to the election results a moot point.

One thing the right has never really appreciated is just how much the quiet voters are repelled by so much of the rhetoric from the left.

Just Passing Through, I see your "Halliburton the next couple of days" and raise you "Halliburton until Tuesday evening."

Cheers,
Frank

Rollins, those stories aren't mutually exclusive.

Score one for the troops!

Textbook Stupidity, Haliburton or some other current delusion over the weekend but new "surprise' will be floated late Sunday or Monday am from some MSM outlet. Too little and too late for the left this time around.

I agree with Just Passing Through in that Kerry seems to be running a Howard Dean type of campaign, one far to the left to keep his rabid base happy.

Look also where Kerry is campaigning: in many places that should be Dem strongholds.

Kerry's campaign at this point doesn't look like a winning one.

That is an important story.

Um, you were talking about the "CBSNEWS to releases backstage video of Ashlee Simpson at SNL..." story, right? ;-)

I am from southern NH, called the southern tier as a way to distinquish the area as full of transplanted folks from Mass. The area has very different political leanings from the rest of the state, just as Mass itself has a very different political culture outside the Boston, Worcester, and Springfield hubs, but is by no means automatically democrat.

Southern NH is assumed to be for Kerry because he is a Mass boy, not because they are firmly in the democratic camp. When you look around the area, and listen to what people are saying, I don't think that assumption is correct. The pro-Kerry sentiment is strident, but has no real depth. People not inclined to get into political discussions nevertheless seemed inclined to verbalize a short 'Kerry is an asshole' when the subject does come up.

I think that pattern is being repeated in a lot of states right now but for NH at least, I don't think Kerry can take the state without the southern tier giving a lot more support to him than I see or hear.

Halliburton? Hehe!!!!. Halliburton is what liberals blurt out when they realizes they have no facts to back up their verbal diarrhea.
They lack the logic chromosome and they hope that step cell research can provide them with a cure.

JPT,

What do you think people around your parts will make of Bob Smith's endorsement of Kerry? If people even care about such things.

On the explosives, I think that Geraghty piece sums it up quite nicely. Perspective and context, as you said Bill. While all this is might hurt Bush, I think it's pretty disturbing that this is dominating the last week of the campaign when there are so many other, more important things to debate. I guess you can't expect too much of substance to be discussed this close to an election though. Too bad. For the record I definitely don't want to talk about Halliburton all weekend. Let's talk about minimum wage, social security reform, how to put even more effort into transferring security responsibility to the Iraqis, health care, education, the environment, intelligence restructuring, the supreme court, or anything that actually affects the lives and livelyhood of Americans. These weapons and Halliburton's contracts do not meet that criteria. Sorry for the rant. Good coverage, Bill.

Just Passing Through, did you see the Manchester, NH Victory '04 Rally today?
President Bush was great, and the crowd was huge. Meanwhile, outside, a couple of dozen Kerry supporters looked a little lost.

The New York Times is using the "fake but accurate" defense here.

It's almost impossible to prove that the US Military and IAEA together destroyed all the weapons once existing in the vast compound, so it's okay to report that they were stolen by insurgents.

Just like how CBS to this day says the Bush NG memos "could not be authenticated". As if there's still some doubt about their fakeness and they are still looking for proof they are real.

Just too funny. I don't care about truth anymore, I just want entertainment. And NYT always puts out.

If some or all of the explosives were picked up by US troops, that would mean that less would be in the hands of insurgents. However, the fact that the COmmander in Chief cannot definitively account for the explosives is disturbing, at best. The facts show that the explosives were unguarded for a long period of time. The facts show that the military and the administration do not keep a systematic, accurate record of what explosives have been found and what was done with them. If they did, Bush would have been able to refute or confirm the story later the same day. Since, even now, nobody can say for sure what happened to the explosives, the point remains: the planning and the execution of the war were deficient. It has been reported that only a brigade-sized force was tasked to securing the known arms depots, and there were 90 known. That's about 40 troops per depot. That was not enough. If we had sent in more troops, we might have been able to secure the depots. Bush insists that there are enough tropps, but this appears to refute his contention.

Overall, I would say that this news may blunt the impact of the explosives story, but it by no means relieves Mr. Bush of the allegation that the planning for the war was not adequate.

Joseph j7uy5: How much experience with planning of military operations do you have? Most likely zero.

Answer me this: what level of troops would have been adequate to secure every bit of explosives, ammo, and weapons in Iraq, given that the whole country was an ammo dump? How many? 300,000...400,000...you can't put a number on it, can you? You can't because you don't know what you are talking about.

In any complex operation it is naive to assume that more people equals better results. Consider a team of surgeons and nurses in an operating room...would more doctors and nurses always result in better results? Of course not. When a surgeon loses a patient, can one say that if there had been more surgeons, or more nurses, the patient would not have been lost? Of course that is laughable.

We could have invaded Iraq with a million troops, and there still would have been ammo and explosives lost and unaccounted for. And of course, there would have been more American targets, and more of a feel that Americans were occupiers and not liberators, and you liberals would have been faulting Bush for sending in too many troops.

The operation in Iraq has been a great success in military history, and is one we can all be proud of. It's just that the Dems need something to use as a political weapon.

I was at the Manchester rally, and the crowd was very large. My biggest laugh though was while waiting in line on of the Kerry protestors came over and called those of us in line "Baby Killers." Although, I am not super confident that Bush is going to win the state-I think it will be a close one, but I am pretty sure our town will come in on the Bush side.

I think Kerry has painted himself into a corner on this one. He is now relegated to attacking the military and calling soldiers who were doing their duty "liars" and I don't think it is going to sit well with those who are still waivering (although I am yet to understand how anyone can still be undecided at this point in the race).

Mantis, I don't know that that matters all that much. I am not sure any endorsements matter all that much in this years campaign either way. It's a new world pal. Endorsements may fly with the older generations that depended on them to help with their voting decision in the past. They don't with generations that make more use of access to far more information outside the pipelines than they ever had available to them before. People are being repelled by aspects of the national campaigns politics that they did not give too much thought to in the past. Dan Rather would have gotten away with what was nothing more or less than shilling for Kerry 4 years ago. His schtick was exposed so rapidly and convincingly that a meme that would have lasted until the election 4 years ago lasted less than a week and badly hurt CBS.

Just Me, I am not ready to call NH for Bush yet, but I know that the support in the southern tier of the state is nowhere near as firmly for Kerry as the conventional wisdom would have it. It's a horse race at best for Kerry, and Bush knows it also.

Just Passing Through

I so hope you are right, and that there are more Bush supporters down there than conventional wisdom suggests.

Generally up in our area the republicans dominate, so I expect Bush to win here. I have also been out knocking on doors in the get out the vote efforts, and the results of that have been pretty promising.

I am keeping my fingers crossed on this one.

Apparently most of you people are like the President and only selectively receive the news. The story that Americans "may have destroyed 250 tons" of the explosives does not end the story.

The Iraqis say the explosives were there and were looted and they are the sovereign leaders of their country, or so we say.

Even if 250 out of 380 tons were destroyed, how many nuclear bombs can be detonated by the other 130 tons? It only took one pound of that stuff to blow up the plane over Lockerbie Scotland. Let's see, that would be only enough of that stuff missing to destroy 260,000 jets, wow, that is so reassuring.

There are other stories where Iraqi leaders say they asked the Americans to safeguard that facility, and the Americans said their orders were to go to Baghdad. If this is true, criticizing this is in no way denigrating the soldiers in the field. It is rightfully denigrating the idiots who supposedly planned the war.

You people are mentally what I would call a total loss. You are incapable of looking at the situation and learning the truth, because the only truth you believe is what comes out of the Bush administration. You are all out of touch with reality, just like your soon to be ex-President!

" It only took one pound of that stuff to blow up the plane over Lockerbie Scotland."

Apparantly you have missed a few news reports as well. The pound of explosive that blew up the plane in Scotland wasn't RMX or HMX, but a different explosive. It did have RMX as a component of the mixture.

Also, the common sense factor has to arrive at some point. Why don't you try it. You can't haul away 300-400 tons of explosives in a couple of pick up trucks. The roads were being travelled heavily by our soldiers and being watched from the skies. So please tell me how looters managed to move 300-400 tons under our soldiers own noses.

Also, putting that in perspective-300 tons is a miniscule portion of the weapons and explosives Saddam had at his disposal. Our troops have destroyed or is in the proccess of destroying more than half of it.

But I do think it is almost laughable, that after screaming "No WMD's" for months, the liberals have now decided there really were WMD's in Iraq. BTW why aren't you holding the IAEA and the UN accountable for letting Saddam keep the explosives, if they were so dangerous?

Cool how every major newspaper in the US runs on their website front page, the story about the US Military destroying 250 tons of the explosives.

On the NYT website now, not even the original story is there.

Every newspaper is retracting the New York Times story, except the New York Times.

jim404 is so correct on that point he's making, I couldn't have said it better myself, go jim404 good insights there buddy

That Geraghty kid's a star; mark my words, someday he's going to get hired by a prominent publication.

What the hell is National Review?

Chopped Liver?

I confess. I don't have any experience planning military invasions. Be sure to use that against me, next time I run for president. By the way, the amount of experience I have planning invasions is exactly the same amount that Dick Cheney got while he was busy with "other priorities," and George W. Bush got while he was busy almost finishing his ANG service.

There is more news on the Al Qaaqa expolsives, and it does not look good: neither for the president, nor the media outlets who support him. The link is for Salon, which makes you watch an ad before entering, so don't go there if you are offended by capitolism.

Gosh Joseph -

Considering your med cred I would have assumed two things:

1. That you knew that Cheney was SecDef

2. You knew how to spell capitalism.

Salon links are non grata here. That's like name-dropping the Enquirer.