Category: Politics

Rasmussen’s nightly tracking poll shows the President gaining from the third debate:

Thursday October 14, 2004–The debates are over and there’s less than three weeks until Election Day. The Rasmussen Reports Presidential Tracking Poll shows President George W. Bush with 48% of the vote and Senator John Kerry with 46%.

The Tracking Poll is based upon nightly telephone interviews and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. All but a few of the interviews for today’s report were conducted prior to the completion of last night’s debate.

Prior to the debate, our latest rating’s for the President’s handling of the economy and the situation in Iraq provided further evidence of an evenly divided electorate. In both cases, the number who say the President is doing a good or an excellent job is roughly equal to the number saying he is doing a poor job.

Our latest Electoral College projections show the President ahead with 240 Electoral Votes to 194 for Senator Kerry.

Kerry’s high point was the first debate, and it will be all downhill for him to Nov. 2nd.

In a way, it makes me sad that Kerry’s going to lose because it means that Hillary will have the inside track in 2008. If we can get Giuliani and Schwarzenegger on the ticket, we can take her but that means changing the Constitution.

QandO Blog has an excellent translation of the debate into English.

Dr. Frank discovers a novel campaign by scruffy foreigners to influence our elections: “Dear Sir or Madam: I demand that you withhold your support from the rabidly Zionist neocon imperialist war criminals at once…”.

Check out the sample letters, they’re hilarious in a tin-foil hat, unintention irony sort of a way.

Kerry’s gratuituous reference to the gay Cheney made me cringe. I don’t’ like the guy anyway, but I thought he was raised better than that. It didn’t go over too well with undecided voters either:

Forget his health care plan. Forget abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Forget even how many times he did or did not vote to raise taxes. Senator John Kerry may have lost three critical votes with a simple aside, when he invoked Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter as part of an answer on same-sex marriage.

“That is very unfair,” blurted Patsey Farrell, 64, one of a handful of undecided voters gathered here to watch the final presidential debate Wednesday night. “I’m sorry, that’s too personal. That’s too hurtful.”

Her son-in-law, Kevin Uhde, the 50-year-old elementary school principal who held this pizza party, agreed. “Not by name,” he said, shaking his head at Mr. Kerry on the 24-inch Phillips television set a few yards away. “Why single out one person?”

And Mr. Uhde’s wife, Karlen, added, “I think it’s like a low blow.”

Not only does the man have no core beliefs, he has no manners either. The children of politicians are people, not campaign issues.

Kerry’s a punk.

UPDATE: Liberal Commie “Nation” writer Marc Cooper was creeped out by the gay daughter thing, which he calls Kerry’s worst moment in the debate:

His sucker punch mention of Dick Cheney?s lesbian daughter. Please. Edwards did the same the other night. This is an obvious ploy to drive a wedge between Bush-Cheney and their most reactionary homophobic base. It stinks to high heaven

Yup.

The Iraqi Resistance is made up of some pretty stupid people. Any Iraqi who’s genuinely upset with the American Occupation can help to bring it to a swift conclusion by helping to restore order in the troubled parts of the Sunni Triangle and organizing around his chosen candidates in the January election. Every car bombing, sniper attack or kidnapping just strengthens the occupation and pushes the elections further away.

Some of them have finally started to get the message and help the Coalition take out the foreign terrorists who’re responsible for the atrocities:

U.S. and Iraqi authorities together have insisted that if Fallujah is to avoid an all-out assault aimed at regaining control of the city, foreign fighters must be ejected. Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.

“He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near,” Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said.

One of the foreign guerrillas killed by local fighters was Abu Abdallah Suri, a Syrian and a prominent member of Zarqawi’s group. Suri’s body was discovered Sunday. He was shot in the head and chest while being chased by a carload of tribesmen, according to a security guard who said he witnessed the killing.

This is, of course, bad news for the Democrats who want to turn the War on Terror into a tea party.

How Bush Won Round 2:

When the questioning turned to taxes, Kerry pandered with a liberal’s absurd promise not to sign legislation raising taxes on anybody making less than $200,000 a year, neglecting only to say,”Read my lips.”

Kerry also blundered with a weird attack on an $84 item in the Bushes’ federal income tax return, supposedly from a timber business. “I own a timber company? That’s news to me,” said Bush, adding engagingly in what was the most natural moment in the debate, “Need some wood?” It turns out that Kerry relied on an Annenberg Web site that later admitted it had been confused, which left the Democratic candidate out on a hardwood limb. Bush was too much the gentleman to point out, now that their income taxes were in dispute, that Mrs. Heinz Kerry paid only 11 percent in 2003 on her $5 million income, while the Bushes paid 28 percent.

(Although every Bush slip gets delighted examination – he called Kerry “Kennedy” and he said, “Internets”; can you imagine? – Kerry’s minor gaffes attract little notice. When citing his overseas travel in the first debate, Kerry talked of visiting the old K.G.B. headquarters “in Treblinka square.” He meant Lubyanka Square; Treblinka was the Nazi death camp. We all make mistakes.) …

In an anguishing moment, Kerry said he was against partial-birth abortion (as are most voters, including many pro-choice) and then explained why he voted against the ban that is now law. Countered Bush: “He was given a chance to vote and he voted no. . . . It’s clear for everybody to see. And as I said, you can run, but you can’t hide.”

Like, totally.

Taking a page from Al Gore’s playbook, the defeated Afghan opposition alleges election fraud. Sounds like Democracy to me.

Another body blow to Kerry and his mindless zombie army.

The expertly-coiffed Massachusetts liberal who wants to be America’s king keeps saying that President Bush fired Gen. Shinseki for criticizing Tommy Franks’ plan for the liberation of Iraq, but the timeline don’t fit:

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer said ?You’d think after all these times that John Kerry makes that claim about General Shinseki being forced to retire, not a correct claim, somebody would have told him he’s got to reword his, the way he utters that so-called fact.” On ABC, Jake Tapper said, ?That is incorrect and Senator Kerry must know this by now ? it’s been pointed out on fact checks all over the country. But General Shinseki, who was the Army Chief of Staff, announced his retirement in 2002. He did not make his controversial remarks until 2003, so the idea that he left the military because of the remarks is just not a fact.”

Therefore you must acquit.

Good on ya, Aussies! Prime Minister Michael Howard has won his fourth term in an election seen as a referendum on Australian participation in the liberation of Iraq. Howard’s party not only won, they increased their share of the vote.

Is this a harbinger of things to come in the US? I damn sure hope so. It’s certainly a defeat for Kerry, whose sister lives in Australia where she heads an anti-Howard organization.

This is one country that won’t be leaving the coalition.

See Tim Blair’s for all the details.

The President did what he had to do tonight: called Kerry on his major lies about the Bush record and on the fictitious candidacy that Kerry’s trying to create for himself. He should have done this last time, but probably wasn’t prepared for the intensity of Kerry’s rudeness and deceptiveness. But after the opening round, and Edwards’ chihuahua dog performance Tuesday, it’s clear that these people have nothing to run on but misdirection so he rolled up his sleeves and jumped on into it. We’d all prefer to see campaigns rise above the mud-slinging, but when one sets a nasty tone the other has to match him blow for blow or see his candidacy dissolve under a pile of lies.

I’d like to see the President present a bit more detail on his environmental policies next time, because Clear Skies isn’t well understood, and it’s been demagogued by the Democrats. I’d also like him to explain more clearly that the combination of two circumstances — a war and a recession — caused the deficit to blow up, and how policies that are good for dealing with these things in isolation make no sense when they’re happening together.

You can’t always raise to taxes to fund a war, not when you’ve inherited a recession. I think he made that point well enough for those of us who already understood it, but perhaps not well enough for the less-well-informed.

All in all, the President lost a lot of ground last week, but got some of it back Tuesday night and the rest of it — and maybe a little more — tonight.

Next week is the rubber match, and it’s pretty clear what Kerry’s going to do. He approaches these debates the way a skilled debater always does, by finding the points that are easiest to make and most damaging. These points are typically at odds with Kerry’s strange voting record, so the President has to point that out but not to such an extent that it obscures his real record.

If I were him, I’d say something like: “Sen. Kerry, if your record were consistent with the promises you’ve made tonight and in the other debates, I’d vote for you myself, but we both know it isn’t.”