It is becoming ever more obvious that John Kerry is not the strongest candidate that the Democrat's could run. He seems seriously charisma and integrity impaired. No one really knows, from one day to the next, where he will stand on any given issued, except that he somehow deserves to be President.

The village voice has suggested that maybe Kerry will be pushed aside. The dream candidate for the Left of course is Hillary. I read one pundit tonight who thought that even if she were to lose this year, she would be unopposed in 2008.

I don't see that happening. First, Kerry has been running too long to give it up that easily. This is someone who gets angry. He pretty much played by the rules. Hillary sat on the sidelines. I don't see him going quietly. And if he doesn't go quietly, any sort of palace coup is going to alienate a large percentage of the Democratic base.

The only way to get Kerry to go quietly would be to have something to blackmail him with. It would have to be very very bad though. Proof positive that at that VVAW meeting he agreed to assassinate Senators backing the war? Or that he was a homosexual? But short of that? We already know that he embellished his record to get in and out of Viet Nam in record time, that he probably committed war crimes while there, that after returning, while still technically a U.S. military officer (he was in the reserves at the time), he committed treason, meeting with the enemy for his own purposes. We know that he lied to Congress about war crimes. We know that he blames the Secret Service for his falling while snowboarding. We know that he spent over $1,000 for a haircut before going on TV. We know that he has played games with his wife's money to stay alive politically, both this year, and against Gov. Weld in a previous Senate campaign. He even had his own mini-Bimbo eruption a couple of months ago (appears to have come to nothing though). What could the Clintons have on him that is that much worse than what is already out there on him? Hard to envision.

I think that it would take serious credible blackmail to get Kerry out of the election, and I don't think that anyone, most notably the Clintons and their operatives, have that type of dirt on him. He isn't going to give up his one big chance at the big prize just because they ask him nicely. I think that he would tear up the Democratic party first.

Secondly, Hillary is the only real alternative. Edwards and Dean lost to Kerry in the primaries and caucae. Dean has already shown that he is unstable. Edwards is inexperienced and made his fortune as a trial lawyer litigating cases that turned out to be based on falsities. He essentially transferred money from physicians to himself on since debunked theories.

But Hillary is not really ready yet. Her negatives are still high, for good reason. Her supporters point out that she deserves the nomination because of what she went through. I would suggest that a goodly majority of the population doesn't see things that way. My view, shared by many, is that she put up with Bill's indiscretions in order to live in the White House and to help push the levers of power.

She also promised the people of New York that she wouldn't run in 2004. There is a possibility that they would turn her out of office in 2006, should she turn out to have lied here. Most politicians could probably get away with this, but she has the added problem that she moved into New York to run for the Senate. I think that if she does run in 2004, enough NY voters are going to feel used by her that her 2006 reelection to the Senate would be in jeopardy.

No. She is running for 2008. That is her best shot - as long as the Democrat loses in 2004. Of course, the worse he loses, the better she looks in 2008. By then, her negatives will have resided enough to make her very credible.

Or as Kerry said, Bring Her On.  ¶ 1:42 AM |

  Clinton partisan ambassador, No-Yellowcake-In-Niger, Joe Wilson has a book out, where he outs whomever outed his wife as working for the CIA. Obviously, whomever he is accusing will be known within minutes of the book getting out, if not sooner. After that, I seriously doubt if there is anything else of redeeming value to the book. It will sell, of course, but probably only to the Bush Hating crazies. Hope the publisher takes a bath on it.

The legal problem of course is that copyright does not extend to information, just expression thereof. This means that once one person knows the alleged outers name, then Wilson cannot control dissemination of that information. And that is apparently the thing that will sell the book.

Of course, it is likely that Wilson doesn't have any more idea about who "outed" his wife than any of the rest of us do. He fingered Karl Rove, then had to back off, when it became apparent that the only information that he was going on was that he disliked Rove and Rove was effective. Why should Wilson have this information, and not the FBI, or if the FBI does, and isn't telling us, why did Wilson get the information?

The reality of course is that the information that his wife worked for the CIA was inevitably in the public domain the minute that Wilson flew off the Niger to not find any yellowcake. After all, why should the Bush Administration send a Clinton / Gore partisan on such a mission, unless it was hoodwinked? The answer apparently is that Wilson's wife, from her position in the CIA, suggested that he be sent. Duh.  ¶ 1:19 PM |

  Instapundit quoted SECDEF Rumsfeld on media bias. He pointed out two different ways of indicating that Mosques were involved in the hostilities in Iraq. First, a headline might say "Terrorists Attack Coalition Forces From Mosques" - which is indeed what happened, and why the minaret was knocked down. And then, a headline might say "Mosques Targeted in Fallujah", as was done by the LA Times. In the first, the apparent wrongdoers were the terrorists using the Mosques to attack our troops. In the second, the important thing was that we targeted those Mosques. My feelings are obviously in line with Mr. Rumsfeld. If they use Mosques to attack us, they can expect to have them destroyed.

That said, this brings me to a, hopefully, bigger point. My father is supposedly a middle of the road Republican. But he takes his news from the dominant media. He watches McNeil / Leher every night. He reads the local (Denver) papers. He takes the WSJ, but, I suspect, doesn't read the editorials. I get most of my news online, esp. from such as Drudge, Instapundit, Washington Times, etc. I do look to the left a bit. But I don't get my news from where he does.

His latest thing is that Justice Scalia should be judicially disciplined (by whom?) for refusing to recuse himself from deliberations on the Cheney task force issue currently before the High Court, all because he went hunting with Cheney. My view is that this is an obvious attempt to stack the Court against an expected 5-4 outcome. No different really to me than the Democratic Senators on the Judiciary committee delaying Bush appeals court nominees until the U. Michigan racial quota cases had cleared that appeals court. (Ok, I say Racial Quotas, you say Affirmative Action - no different than Pro-Choice versus Pro-Life). This issue has been hashed out by legal scholars who know much more about this than I do. I seem to remember something on the Volokh Conspiracy, for example. But if you listened to McNeil / Lehrer (as my father did), you would think that this is slam-dunk unethical.

This is a symptom of what I see as two different Americas. Two different realities. One formed through listening to the (liberally biased) dominant media. The other formed by viewing alternative media, such as the Internet and Talk Radio. The scary thing is that we have so little in common.

Another example. John Kerry has indicated that he will go the the U.N. and around Europe to build a "real" coalition, if elected President. I constantly hear from my liberal friends and those, like my father, listening to the dominant media, that Bush should have gone again to the U.N. and should have gotten the French, etc. aboard before invading Iraq. But they are almost totally ignorant about the Oil for Bribes (officially, Oil for Food) program run for the supposed benefit of the Iraqi people by the U.N. What is ignored is that Saddam Hussein was massively bribing the U.N., the French, and in particular, the Russians. Even ignoring the massive bribes, our invasion has moved Iraq from the French and Russian spheres of influence into ours. Why should we expect that either of these countries would have done the "right thing" as to Iraq, if we had just waited a little longer? There is no evidence in favor of this, and much in opposition.

What is scary is that I can pretty well anticipate my father's position on most subjects by looking at what the dominant media were saying shortly before. If they said that Iraq is taking our efforts away from the War on Terror (Huh?), then I will hear that from him, and many of my liberal friends, shortly thereafter. Never mind the proven ties. Never mind that many of those we are fighting these days are terrorists from abroad, including Al Quida.   ¶ 8:51 AM |