...And Welcome to It

Charles Krauthammer nails Edwards to the wall.

This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do the
work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John
Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up
out of that wheelchair and walk again."

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of
demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain,
raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.

Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?

This is the kind of gaffe that ought to be election-losing. It's particularly insulting in the wake of the recent death of Christopher Reeve. Read it all, and then consider whether a vote for Kerry is really in your future.

Lynne Cheney is letting Kerry have it, today over Kerry dragging her family onto the podium.

I agree with Mrs. Cheney. It was a low blow, and cheap, to bring up someone else's children in a debate like that. And he reached for it. That kind of thing tells you the kind of person he is. Judge accordingly.

Not much news and analysis today. I watched debate, and in the other room my sister watched the playoff game. Cards won, Bush won. It was a good night.

Let me tell you, (hey, I sound like John Kerry!) I don't think anybody in St. Louis was hoping for a St. Louis-Houston match-up. But (sounding like John Kerry again!) our boys in red pulled it out, and we can count on more great things to come.

I understand the Yankees (Boo! Hiss!) also won last night. We need a Yankees-Cards series. It's the perfect red state, blue state matchup. And like in the election, the blue states are going down, man, down.

Now on to the debate. I find it hilarious that Dem's, who always claim to be the party of the little guy, always seem to want to elect patrician elitists who want to tell the rest of us what to do. There seems to be a deep-seated royalty issue with them, something that is not as apparent in the Right. Yes, I know the right has been full-on in supporting the President, but you ask any conservative what they disagree with the President on, and Bam! out come a half dozen issues that people think could have been better decided.

Now do the same thing with a Dem? Waiting, waiting? Crickets.

So, anyway, Bush won the debate last night. He had the issues, he defended his policies, and put Kerry on the defensive. And he was warm and fuzzy in a way that Kerry was not. My only regret is that more people watched the playoffs (Go Cards!) than watched Kerry get whipped like the new kid at a boarding school.

Hey, themoe-if you're reading this, drop me an email.

National Review sent me over to this analysis by the The Belmont Club. They look at the same data the New York Times does, and, for free, give you better analysis. How's that for America, heh?

Among other wonderful little fact checks is the following:

The first thing to notice is that 2,139 of the 2,429 attacks took place in
6 of the 18 provinces. The numbers don't entirely add up in the "Times" graphic
but the discrepancy is small and may be due to errors in assigning some
incidents. The real hotbeds are Baghdad and areas to the northwest -- the
Sunni triangle. By far the greatest density of violence is in Baghdad, where
1,000 attacks have taken place in an 732 kilometers square.<[>

So, ashas been reported, in places more honest the the NYT-two thirds of the country is largely safe, with the great majority of the violence relegated to the slice controlled by the Sunnis, specifically the guys who were benefitting most in a Hussein dictatorship.

And I'm loving the new posting tools that blogger has made available to me. I really need to start this up again more regularly.

Eugene Volokh has some interesting analysis of a Kerry moment of truth on the campaign trail.

Terrorism and prostitution:
From a long and interesting article in today's New
York Times Magazine:
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."

I'm not going to quote Volokh's analysis-because I think you should link to his site and read his whole argument. But I think Kerry has shown once again that on the most pressing question of the day, he simply does not have the conviction to carry it through.

This is how you do a pro-life protest. I'm not really upset the group was denied access to the Kerry rally. I've always believed that rallies are for the faithful and their right to peacably assemble trumps the right of protestors to disrupt. But I think the silently powerful statements of the posters here were terrific testament to the true feelings of the pro-life movement, and a damning repudiation of Kerry's stand.