http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6363063/site/newsweek
Ending the Fantasy
Its hard to game the election with all the conflicting polls. But the signs are pointing to a big turnout and a Kerry win
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
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The Bush teams response is also emblematic. First, they deny a charge that is undeniably true, that they went into Iraq with insufficient forces.
Second, they slime the person telling the truth. Kerry wasnt faulting U.S. troops for not finding and securing the missing weapons, as Bush asserted. Kerry was attacking the chicken-hawk civilians who brushed aside pleas from the military for more manpower. Third, Bush falls back on the tried and true, pointing to evidence of a cache of deadly explosives to say this proves Saddam really was dangerous. Its still heresy to say it, but Americans were safer when Saddam was in power. He guarded his high-grade-weapons sites, and just days before the U.S. invasion, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency had monitored the site, warning the Bush administration about the potential danger.
Bush is running against the headlines and no amount of spin can make the bad news out of Iraq look good. He has his finger in the **** with Iraq, and there was a little leakage this week, says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. In addition to the revelation about the explosives, Bushs good friend, Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, accused U.S. forces of willful neglect in the deaths of dozens of newly trained Iraqi soldiers gunned down as they traveled in an unarmed and unguarded convoy. Then word leaked that the White House would ask Congress after the election for $70 billion more for Iraq, upping the cost of the war to $225 billion.
Defending Bush is getting harder, but that doesnt deter the diehards. Conservative talk-show hosts were pushing the theory that Russian trucks hauled the missing explosives to Syria before the war. And thats the good news: that its not in the hands of insurgents in Iraq, its in the hands of terrorists in Syria, says Wittmann, laughing at the absurdity of the claim. In an effort to throw Bush a lifeline, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani went on the Today show and said what Bush had wrongly accused Kerry of sayingthat failure to find and secure the weapons was the troops fault. No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be with the troops that were there," said Giuliani. "Did they search carefully enough? Didnt they search carefully enough?
Its hard to game the election with all the conflicting polls, but my prediction is that it will break at the last minute for Kerry. With more than two thirds of the undecided voters saying the country is on the wrong track, Kerry should win. Bush got 47.9 percent of the vote in 2000, and thats where he is stuck today.
A record voter turnout is expected, and that signals change, not four more years of the status quo.
They also claim we have no reasons for voting for Kerry. I see about 100 pages of reasons why.
It's people like you who really do make a difference in this country.
