Hugh Hewitt - It is looking very good indeed.
The Battleground Poll --along with Gallup, the best over many election cycles-- has Bush up by 5, with his approval rating at 53%. Very, very encouraging for the Bush-Cheney troops. Like heavy rain on a flood for the Kerry-Edwards' bedraggled. Keep checking RealClearPolitics throughout the day for the latest druid chants of politics. (And Hedgehog has the Badger Poll giving Bush a lead of 3 in Wisconsin. It has the best name for a poll.)
A soldier's question.
"Sir, eight out of ten soldiers support the president. Why is it so hard for the civilians to get it?"
I was greeting members of the audience and signing books after a speech to a GOTV rally in Colorado Springs, and the soldier in front of me looked 18, but told me he'd been in for 11 years. His name was Rashid
"A majority do, and the rest are figuring it out," I replied. Earlier, a veteran of the Iraq campaign, during the Q. and A. had stated he'd been assigned a brief bit of duty at a different munitions dump. "This was 10 miles by 10 miles," said. "We patrolled by helicopter. Occasionally a pick-up truck would dart in and out, but there was no looting, and there was no way to guard such places except by the air."
Tommy Franks' amazement at the charges coming from John Kerry and company about his, his planning team, and the execution of the plan by the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines he commanded is beginning to boil over. (HT to K-Lo at The Corner.) Kerry is trying to argue that all blame for all mistakes lies on George W. Bush, and that he's not slagging the troops. But that's not how the troops are hearing it. A call to the program yesterday from the proud mom of a member of the 3rd I.D. was a voice of outrage and anger directed at Kerry. "He [Kerry] has no idea how he sounds," she fumed. "My son is a brave and competent hero." Kerry thinks he's a bumbler. But how surprising is that. He also thinks the men and women he served with in Vietnam were war criminals.
But because the numbers and momentum have turned against them, Kerry & Co. keep doubling down, despite huge gaps in their evidence, contrary evidence such as the I.A.E.A. internal memo flatly contradicting al Baredi's political hit on the Bush, and the growing evidence that Russian involvement spirited not just RDX but also perhaps the missing WMD out of the country as we crammed for the global test Kerry wants to make a requirement of every course of American action. This is not the mindset or character of a Commander-in-Chief.
Undecideds have figured this out. The Boston Globe has been following one group of six "undecideds" in northeast Ohio:
"The six voters, part of a larger focus group, met Wednesday night for a final pre-election dinner. Of the six, two had committed to Bush in the summer, and four been had been unsure of whom to vote for in previous meetings. Now, two of the previously undecided were backing Kerry, one the president, and the remaining voter, John George, remained undecided.
Those who are supporting Bush say they are doing so chiefly because they think he is stronger on national security issues, and also because they do not trust Kerry. The Kerry supporters are with the Democrat largely because they are unhappy with Bush's handling of the war and the economy."
Bush has captured 50% of this sample and may get two-thirds. Look for uneasy Democrats to desert Kerry this weekend even as he deserted the military he wishes to command by ending his campaign ridiculing their magnificent achievement in liberating Iraq in three weeks. Every set-back he has assigned to them and their leadership up to the president. For his own self-interest, he has campaigned on denigrating their effectiveness and refusing to credit their successes from the rout of the Taliban, to the securing of the Afghan vote, to the suppression of the insurgency in Najaf and the looming battle to crush the Fallujah terror hub. Every sign points to the completion of elections in Iraq and, as in Afghanistan, a steady and determined march towards the construction of a democratically based government that is an ally, not an enemy, in the global war on terror. We need such allies, not more resolutions from a U.N. grown fat and corrupt on the Oil-for-Food-for-Weapons-for-Dictators-and-Dollars-for French Sharpies program.
The Beltway turns on Kerry
Matthew Dowd, senior strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign, is "cautiously optimistic." He should be. Here is one of those small signs of Beltway conviction that Kerry is a loser. Anthony Cordesman is no friend of the Administration, but the senior analyst at the Center for International Security is one of the "go-to" experts admired by the press. The Washington Post puts him on the front page this morning:
"There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened at al Qaqaa," Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an assessment yesterday. "The munitions at al Qaqaa were at most around 0.06 percent of the total."
The entire Bradley Graham and Thomas Ricks' article is a gift to the Bush campaign on the closing weekend, underscoring the madness of Saddam and the nature of the enemy George W. Bush ordered his military to topple. Finally here is a piece to send your friends on the nature of Saddam's threat. Kerry's play to focus on the I.A.E.A. fraud has boomeranged into a focus on the Saddam that Kerry would have let continue in power (along with his mad-as-a-hatter son) and the absurdity of sending out ten, twenty, or a thousand teams of Scot Ritters in Broncos to control the place as the oil vouchers passed from hand to hand.
The Post article adds another detail for the al Qaqaa obsessed:
"On Wednesday, ABC News reported that IAEA documents indicated there were only about 3 tons of RDX remaining at Qaqaa in January 2003, two months before the U.S.-led invasion. Yesterday, however, IAEA officials said records showed another 138 tons of the RDX were being kept then at a military warehouse used by Qaqaa's managers at Mahaweel, 25 miles away. The IAEA has not accounted for an additional 14 tons in the July 2003 Iraqi declaration."
Twenty-five miles away? So we have been asking the wrong embedded reporters and focusing on the wrong satellite photos? Of course, at this point we could have a bird in the sky video of Zarqawi and Uday directing traffic at the warehouse 25 miles away on March 10th, and a cell phone transcript of their report to Zawahiri in Waziristan, and Kerry would still assert George Bush had botched it all up.
The New York Times continues to try and shore up its badly bungled hit on George Bush, but neglects to note the 377 ton vs. 3 ton killer, or the news of the new warehouse. Buried at the bottom of today's story is a huge admission that the original hit on Bush was built on sand:
"Yesterday Mohamed al-Sharaa, director of the national monitoring directorate at the Iraq Ministry of Science and Technology, explained for the first time why Iraqi officials had specified in their letter to the United Nations agency that the explosives had been looted after April 9, 2003. 'We have some witnesses,' Mr. Sharaa said outside his office at the ministry. 'They say that the materials,' he added, were 'in this site after April 9.'
The witnesses were people working at Al Qaqaa, Mr. Sharaa said. Still, he said, the evidence is not yet definitive, and 'we don't say it's impossible' that the material was somehow taken out of Al Qaqaa before the American forces came through the area. The first American forces arrived at Al Qaqaa on April 3.
Rashad M. Omar, the minister of science and technology, said that as far as he was concerned, the exact timing of the disappearance remained unknown. 'How, where, when is it taken, all these questions, we don't have answers,' Dr. Omar said.
He said a committee headed by himself was about to undertake an investigation of the disappearance, in parallel with American efforts to clear up the mystery. Dr. Omar said that he was extremely confident that the investigations would determine the facts of the case.
'The quantity was so huge,' Dr. Omar said. 'Somebody must know what happened to the material. I am sure the facts will not be hidden for a long time.'"
So an official below Dr. Omar --cited in Monday's report-- now says they have "witnesses" who worked at al QaQaa, but he's not sure what date these witnesses confirmed the RDX was there? Did the Timesmen bother to ask how these "witnesses" would get on and off the inactive base after April 9, or exactly what it is they observed? What a lousy cover-up. And what about that warehouse 25 miles away? Captain Ed has more, building on KerrySpot.
I have spent this much text on this "absurd" argument --Cordesman's word, not mine--- because it will be chanted by the desperate left and the discouraged band of Kerryites all weekend long. They have nothing left except their erratic and almost certainly soon-to-be-bitter-and-blaming-everyone-but-himself John Kerry.
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