SaveTheCountry.net

"Let's face it: whatever happens in Thursday's debate, cable news will proclaim President Bush the winner. This will reflect the political bias so evident during the party conventions. It will also reflect the undoubted fact that Mr. Bush does a pretty good Clint Eastwood imitation."
Paul Krugman in the New York Times

An Army officer in Iraq who wrote a highly critical article on the administration's conduct of the war is being investigated for disloyalty -- if charged and convicted, he could get 20 years.
Salon.com
Click here to read the essay that prompted the investigation.

"Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington are no more likely to reexamine their core beliefs than the Taliban mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and pray harder."

Naomi Klein in Harpers

"The suggestion that terrorists support Sen. John F. Kerry for president is ugly, but basically silly. The suggestion that Kerry supports the terrorists is flat-out disgusting."

"Compared with Kerry, George W. Bush is a coward. This is not a reference to their respective activities during Vietnam. It refers to the current election campaign. Bush happily benefits from the slime his supporters are spreading but refuses to take responsibility for it or to call point-blank for it to stop. He got away with this when the prime mover was the shadowy Swift boats group. Will he get away with it when the accusers are his own vice president, high officials of his own administration (Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage) and members of Congress from his own party (House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert or Sen. Orrin Hatch)? The answer is yes: Based on recent experience, he probably will get away with it."

Editorial in the Los Angeles Times

"In 1999, George W. Bush said we needed to cut taxes because the economy was doing so well that the U.S. Treasury was taking in too much money, and we could afford to give some back to the people who earned it. In 2001, Bush said we needed the same tax cuts because the economy was doing poorly, and we had to return the money so that people would spend and invest it."

"Now Bush is playing the same game in postwar Iraq. When violence there was subsiding, he said it proved he was on the right track. Now violence is increasing, and Bush says this, too, proves he's on the right track."

William Saletan for Slate.com

The understatement of the century....

"Fewer than two-thirds of the former soldiers being reactivated for duty in Iraq and elsewhere have reported on time, prompting the Army to threaten some with punishment for desertion."
USA Today

"Karl Rove is at his most formidable when running close races, and his skills would be notable even if he used no extreme methods. But he does use them. His campaign history shows his willingness, when challenged, to employ savage tactics."
Joshua Green in The Atlantic

From the Telegraph, the leading conservative British paper:

British officials gave warning more than two years ago that Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, was seen as "a western stooge" who "lacked domestic credibility", secret documents seen by The Telegraph reveal.

The Cabinet Office told ministers a year before the war in Iraq that the external opposition, made up of Mr Allawi's Iraqi National Accord and Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, was "weak, divided and lacks domestic credibility".

Mr Allawi, who was closely aligned with the CIA, and Mr Chalabi, who was initially the choice of many within the administration as Iraqi leader, were regarded by most Iraqis as "western stooges", warned a "Secret UK Eyes Only" options paper.

"If there is one thing we knew about Bin Laden before the start of the Iraq war, it was that he wasn't in Iraq. With the invasion of Iraq, Bin Laden got all the benefits of being America's public enemy No. 1, but none of the disadvantages. "

"He got an explosion of anti-Americanism around the world, potential recruits lined up out the cave door and around the block for future suicide missions, swell new opportunities for terror in the chaos of Iraq itself, and the forcible retirement of Hussein, whom he never cared for. He got more than 1,000 Americans dead and hundreds of billions of infidel dollars gone — results that would make any terrorist episode a huge success — without having to lift a finger. And meanwhile, every bomb dropped on Iraq was a bomb not dropped on him. What's not to like?"

Michael Kinsley in the Los Angeles Times

"A survey published this month by the Program on International Policy Attitudes in Washington, which conducts polls on global issues, found that Europeans overwhelmingly opposed Bush's re-election. Kerry was the favored candidate even in Britain, the Bush administration's closest ally. There, 47 percent of those interviewed said they would choose Kerry, compared with 16 percent for Bush. "
San Francisco Chronicle

The Nation

Not that the Bush Administration is too concerend about dead Iraquis, but the interim government says Americans have killed twice as many Iraquis as the insurgents have.

"He was mucking up bad, Killian told us," Linke says. "He just became afraid to fly."
Folio Weekly, Jacksonville

The Next President Is Likely to Appoint At Least Three Supreme Court Justices
John Dean on FindLaw.com

"The mailings include images of the Bible labeled "banned" and of a gay marriage proposal labeled "allowed." A mailing to Arkansas residents warns: "This will be Arkansas if you don't vote." A similar mailing was sent to West Virginians."
The New York Times

David Corn in The Nation

"President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq -- a line of attack that tests the conventional bounds of political rhetoric. "
Dana Milbank in the Washingtion Post

Bush by numbers: Four years of double standards
Graydon Carter in The Independent
A nice little summary of what has gone wrong- here's the opening:

"1 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security issued between 20 January 2001 and 10 September 2001 that mentioned al-Qa'ida.

104 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein.

101 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned missile defence.

65 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned weapons of mass destruction.

0 Number of times Bush mentioned Osama bin Laden in his three State of the Union addresses.

73 Number of times that Bush mentioned terrorism or terrorists in his three State of the Union addresses. "

Graham book: Inquiry into 9/11, Saudi ties blocked
"Two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers had a support network in the United States that included agents of the Saudi government, and the Bush administration and FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship, Sen. Bob Graham wrote in a book to be released Tuesday."
Miami Herald

Media Matters for America
While CNN and other media outlets continue to give invaluable free coverage to the discredited liars attacking Senator John Kerry's Vietnam record, they continue to ignore President George W. Bush's own Vietnam-era record.

Priceless story describing the charming Senator at a book signing:
Washington Post

"The Bush-supporting, Kerry-savaging Democrat is soldiering through a lunchtime book-signing before a winding procession of GOP fans at the Hilton hotel on Sixth Avenue Thursday. He rarely looks up as members of an adoring public come before him, each spending $28.24 for a copy of his book, "A National Party No More." His face is the perfect visual expression of the word "ewwwww."

"Be aware that Zell will not be personalizing books," an aide repeated for the benefit of those on line. "He's just writing his name. Got that?"

Got it.

Even so, the speech moved books, which suits the senator. As the book-signing was coming to an end, Miller signed furiously, piling books on top of each other even after telling an aide to "shut off the line" of people waiting to meet him.

"Zell, can I get a picture?" a young woman says. Miller obliges, mustering a toothless grin.

"Okay, I'm outta here," Miller says, disappearing behind a curtain.

We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned—and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

Zell Miller's Attack on Kerry: A Little Out Of Date
Factcheck.org
"All the weapons cited by Miller are listed in a memo from the 1984 Kerry campaign, which we posted along with our Feb. 26 article on Republican distortions of Kerry's defense record. In that 1984 memo Kerry called for 'cancellation' of the very weapons Miller cited.
Kerry the Senator
Once elected, however, Kerry's voting record evolved. He did cast votes more than a decade ago against the B-2 Stealth Bomber in 1989, 1991 and 1992. But by 1992 even President Bush (the current incumbent's father) was calling for cancellation of the B-2 and promising to cut military spending by 30% in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was no secret -- Bush did that in his 1992 State of the Union address. But Miller left out that little detail."