Stop bringing it on!!!

John Kerry has repeatedly invited Bush to "Bring it on!" ... especially with regards to examining Kerry's Vietnam record. The problem with issuing such a challenge (apart from the fact that it's a transparent example of Kerry trying to ride on the coattails of the only Democrat administration in living memory that has been even remotely likeable ... Jeb Bartlet's) is, however, that whereas it might play well with a friendly audience at home, there's always the danger that your opponent will, well, bring it on.

And Kerry's opponents did. The Swiftboat Veterans for Truth (not to mention others) have been bringing it on for months now, and they aren't going to stop until they hear Johnny's concession speech. And maybe not even then.

And so Kerry did what he does best: flip flopped. His new position became: "How dare they bring it on! Who do they think they are?!"

For months the only 527's that showed up on radar were pro-Kerry groups, burning through millions of dollars as fast as George Soros could shovel it to them (and that's pretty fast). During that time there's nary a word from Kerry (or Bush) to protest such ads. Then the Swift Vets show up with a few thousand dollars of ads and Kerry takes about 38 seconds to get on the air huffing and puffing and demanding that Bush knock it off with the 527 ads.

Well, Bush was happy to call for an end to 527 ads. Except that it turned out that Kerry didn't mean all 527 ads ... just the anti-Kerry ones (Message: pro-Kerry 527 ads - good; pro-Bush 527 ads - evil, probably Hitleresque). We know the courts tend to be activist, but unless Kerry could get his case before this one, there's no way they're going to find that pro-Kerry 527's are acceptable but pro-Bush ones aren't, even if they task the Hubble to search the penumbra of the third amendment.

So Kerry and all his 527's kept running their anti-Bush ads. But the Swifties kept running their ads, too. And then Kerry noticed a distressing phenomenon: his ads were all getting ignored, but the Swift Vet ads were sucking all the oxygen out of the Kerry bubble. A sane person examining this curiosity might further wonder why it is that the Swifties (budget next to nothing) had such an effect when the Lefties (budget $100 million) accomplished nothing. (Does anyone even remember one of the pro-Kerry ads?) The only reasonable conclusion is that the Swift Vet ads rang true with voters whereas the Lefty ads rang true with Ted Kennedy and Barbara Streisand.

And so, having been beaten at his own game, Kerry once again hauls himself onto TV and arrogantly demands that all these ads just stop! Will somebody please just make them go away!

All this has got to make one wonder. If Kerry talks tough ("Bring it on!") to Bush but then caves the moment he gets a little bit of heat, is he really the fellow we want to trust to stand up to terrorists? If he collapses when met with verbal opposition, how crazy do you have to be to think he'll have a will of steel when faced with the psychopathic, murderous, no-holds-barred death-cult of radical Islam?

Who knows? Maybe Kerry isn't flip flopping on this. Maybe it just depends what the definition of "bring it on" is.

Iowa Electronic Markets

In case you're interested, the IEM isn't looking very good for Kerry. Although it was close for a while, the past month has shown Bush pulling away steadily. At the moment they give Kerry a slight lead in the "will win the popular vote but have less that 52% of the two-party vote". Which might sound good except for the fact that the only reason Bush's numbers are so low on that one is that pretty much everyone thinks Bush will win with more than 52% of the two-party vote. These guys are playing by choice and with real money, so in theory their opinions are a little more carefully considered than the typical respondent to a poll.

Still, Time or CNN or the New York Times might want to take this opportunity to run a report headlined: "Kerry slightly more likely than Bush to win election with less that 52% of the two-party vote."

Windsurfing and flip-flopping

Here's an odd thing: an issue that John Kerry has two positions on!

The Bush campaign has launched a new ad with John Kerry windsurfing. It shows Kerry going first one way and then another as it lists his various contradictory positions on Iraq. It ends with "John Kerry ... whichever way the wind blows".

The Kerry Spot quotes a CNN article which has Kerry and Edwards bitterly complaining about the ad:

The Kerry campaign reacted angrily to the ad, charging that its "lighthearted" approach was inappropriate in the middle of a war.

"This is a shameful advertisement that shows a disturbing disregard for those fighting and sacrificing in Iraq," said Kerry spokesman Mike McCurry, who demanded that the president repudiate it.

Edwards offered a similar critique during an appearance in Miami, Florida.

"Today George Bush is laughing again. Over 1,000 Americans have lost their lives. Americans are being beheaded. Iraq is a mess, and they think this is a joke," Edwards said. "It is clear they have no idea how to protect our troops, but they will do anything to protect their jobs."

If Kerry doesn't like humour, then he shouldn't say such laughable things. But, more to the point, it's a bit rich to hear Kerry & Edwards complaining about joking in the same week that Kerry went on Letterman!

So Bush should immediately run a second windsurfing ad that has exactly the same video & music, but the audio & text should alternate between Kerry on Letterman and Kerry whining about Bush having the gall to joke during wartime.

Kerry the walking Parody

As always, Mark Steyn is right on the money:

If it weren’t for the small matter of the war for civilization, I’d find it hard to resist a Kerry Presidency. Groucho Marx once observed that an audience will laugh at an actress playing an old lady pretending to fall downstairs, but, for a professional comic to laugh, it has to be a real old lady. That’s how I feel about the Kerry campaign. For the professional political analyst, watching Mondale or Dukakis or Howard Dean stuck in the part of the guy who falls downstairs is never very satisfying: they’re average, unexceptional fellows whom circumstances have conspired to transform into walking disasters. But Senator Kerry was made for the role, a vain thin-skinned droning blueblood with an indestructible sense of his own status but none at all of his own ridiculousness. If Karl Rove had labored for a decade to produce a walking parody of the contemporary Democratic Party’s remoteness, condescension, sense of entitlement, public evasiveness and tortured relationship with military matters, he couldn’t have improved on John F Kerry.

Bush sums up Kerry on Iraq

President Bush gave a speech in New York on Monday, in which he nicely dealt with the latest Kerry position on Iraq:

Today my opponent continued his pattern of twisting in the wind, with new contradictions on old positions in Iraq. He woke up this morning and now decided, no, we shouldn't have invaded Iraq. After, last month, saying he would still have voted for using force, knowing everything we know today. He believes our national security would be stronger with Saddam Hussein in power, not in prison.

Today he said -- and I quote -- "We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure." Direct quote.

I -- anyway. You cannot -- it's hard to imagine a candidate running for President prefers the stability of a dictatorship to the hope and security of democracy. If I might, I'd like to read a quote he said last December: "Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe we are not safer with his capture don't have the judgment to be President, or the credibility to be elected President." I couldn't have put it better.

The paper trail

Sorry this is a bit late, but the Washington Post has a devastating comparison of the fake memos with authentic ones. The CBS/DNC memos fail on so many points that the fact that Dan Rather thought anyone would fall for them only serves to manifest his colossal arrogance.

DNC internal memo

111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron
P.O. Box 12345
Houston, Texas 77034

21 September 2004/1972

MEMORANDUM TO ALL WRITERS

SUBJECT: New Word settings

Effective immediately please ensure that all documents produced with Microsoft Word for "Lucy Ramirez" are left justified and use Courier 10 as the font. Also, please run all documents through a photocopier a minimum of 15 "generations". And no more of that little "th" thing!

Jerry Killian
Lt. Colonel

CBS internal memo

111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron
P.O. Box 12345
Houston, Texas 77034

21 September 2004/1972

MEMORANDUM TO ALL STAFF

SUBJECT: Mary Mapes' going away party

Although it is clear that Ms. Mapes will be leaving us shortly, we have not yet announced the date for her going away party. Please expect the date to be announced within the next 7 days on The Drudge Report. It is likely that her party will be followed immediately by similar parties for Dan Rather, Andrew Heyward, Richard Katz, Bill Glennon, Mary Beth Cahill, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Terry McAuliffe - in more or less that order.

Jerry Killian
Lt. Colonel

Some of the things that are missing from Dan's "apology"

Where is his apology to the First Lady for ridiculing her doubt of the
memos' authenticity?

Where is his apology to the President for running a shoddy partisan smear
segment based on nothing but cheap forgeries supplied by a Democrat hack?

Where is his apology for constantly insisting (knowing it was untrue) that
his source was "unimpeachable"?

Where is his apology for viciously maligning those who questioned the documents'
authenticity? Apparently the people he so smugly denounced as morons were
right after all.

Where is his apology to all of us for thinking we're so stupid that he could
slip such ridiculously poor forgeries past us? And for thinking that all he
had to do was huff and puff and the sheer grandeur of Dan Rather would be
enough to make us reject inconsequential things like evidence and facts?

Where is his proof of how sorry he is? That is, why hasn't he exposed the
forger?

Why hasn't he apologized for being so hungry to help Kerry that he rushed
the cheapest junk he could find to air?

And where are the apologies of all the other editors, producers, and executives who are
accomplices?

Heads need to roll ... starting with Rather's, but not ending there ... if
CBS is ever again to be taken seriously as anything other than an appendage of the
Democratic Party.

Dan's "apology"

In an effort to win this year's Too Little, Too Late award, Dan Rather "apologized" for attempting to foist pathetically crude forgeries upon the American people in an effort to help Kerry win the election.

Experts fluent in Rather-speak have translated his "apology" into English:

"I, Dan Rather, greatest of all news men and conduit of truth, am deeply sorry that you mortals have not accepted your lot in life, which is to accept everything I say without question. All right-wing bloggers are morons. Which begs the question of what that makes me since they bested me without breaking a sweat. But they don't have my hair stylist. So there! In any event, I'm not at all sorry for airing the obviously fake memos, but I am deeply sorry that I was exposed, because that means many bad things for America:

"1. You peons have an inflated opinion of yourselves and actually seem to believe that you are entitled to question my word.

"2. Unless you're stupid enough to fall for the "Lucy Ramirez" nonsense, John Kerry is in big trouble as soon as you find out that his campaign was involved in the leaking of those memos.

"3. Which means that the moron Bush is going to win another election.

"4. John Roberts is in line for a promotion.

"5. Which is just as well since I'm going to be busy over the next several months playing a new reality game called 'Evade the Felony Charges'.

"I hate you all. Sorry."

"Lucy Ramirez" ... Burkett code for "DNC"

Well, well, well. Bill Burkett has yet another story about where he got the documents. In today's version Bill got them form "Lucy Ramirez". Oddly enough, nobody seems to be able to find "Lucy Ramirez". Not just Lucy, but any evidence that she exists. (Although word (no pun intended) has it that Dan Rather has some early 70's memos that prove she does.)

"Lucy Ramirez" is just the kind of person the anti-Bush crowd needs: someone who can't be reached for any kind of verification. Because everyone else they've trotted out as "proof" that Bush is responsible for both World Wars, poverty, and the Black Plague ends up either a) stating that the Lefties are lying, or b) demonstrating themselves to be so dishonest that they do more harm than good to the Democrats.

"Lucy Ramirez" won't give the Kerry Crowd those kinds of problems. She'll give them much bigger ones. Because as soon as it becomes clear that Burkett has moved on from conspiring in forging documents to conspiring in forging whole people (that is, in about three days) everyone is going to realize that "Lucy Ramirez" is Burkett-speak for "DNC".

What Bill Burkett doesn't seem to realize is that after admitting to telling lies about his source the first time through, his credibility the second time through leaves something to be desired. He could have just said that Hitler gave him the memos, but since he's already on record as saying that Bush is Hitler, that won't quite work.

Of course it's possible that the unknown, but eerily convenient "Lucy Ramirez" really does exist. But by application of Occam's Razor...