Quite a week

Ridiculous though it may be, there are millions of voters who don’t make up their minds about which presidential candidate to back until the very last week of the campaign. Why they can’t choose in advance is truly beyond me, but this nevertheless happens every election season. But in 2004, this should be yet another […]

Halliburton scandal gets much worse for Bush administration

Three weeks ago, at the vice presidential debate, John Edwards railed against no-bid contracts for Halliburton. Dick Cheney dismissed the accusations out of hand. “Well, the reason they keep mentioning Halliburton is because they’re trying to throw up a smokescreen. They know the charges are false…. It’s an effort that they’ve made repeatedly to try […]

Leading hawk says we’d be ‘a lot safer’ not having gone to war

I know this is a couple of days old, but Peter Galbraith’s column in the Boston Globe on Wednesday, brought to my attention by B.C., captures the intense, and poignant, regret of a man who backed the war in Iraq and helped make it happen. Galbraith saw first hand that Iraq was slipping away almost […]

100,000

Bush on March 17, 2003, shortly before the war began: “Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them. If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you.” A peer-reviewed study, released […]

Still preparing for that post-presidency televangelist career

The Boston Globe had an interesting observation today about Bush’s campaign events. Bush campaign rallies often have the feel of revivals — not only in the religious references sprinkled through the president’s stump speeches, but also because of the intensity of his supporters’ adoration. The crowds are screened to ensure that only Bush supporters attend, […]

Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolves?

It was supposed to be the ad to end the campaign. Karl Rove did focus groups on the spot and saw reactions so strong, he held it to the very end of the race so it’d have strongest impact. GOP weirdo Dick Morris said the ad “has sparked an amazing surge in Bush’s support to […]

Giuliani’s ‘Blame the Troops’ tack — the fallout

Shortly after BC04’s top campaign surrogate, Rudy Giuliani, blamed the U.S. troops for the Al Qaqaa debacle, the Bush team started looking for a way to spin out of it. Since Giuliani’s words were pretty clear, and were uttered on national television, their options were limited. They relied on the “context” angle. Later, in a […]

More than a seat at the table

For years, that was the religious right’s stated goal with Republicans — they wanted a “seat at the table.” The idea was, the GOP is made up of a series of competing factions; groups like the Christian Coalition wanted the opportunity to weigh in on the Republican agenda to make sure it reflected the movement’s […]

Another bogus defense for Al Qaqaa put to rest

Bush and his surrogates have experimented with a variety of justifications for the missing tons of deadly explosives at Al Qaqaa, nearly all of which have proven either unpersuasive or completely wrong. The one they’ve really rallied behind the past couple of days, however, is the possibility that the munitions were taken from the facility […]

Bush’s crowd control — Coming back to haunt him edition

After all that we’ve seen, it’s nothing short of bizarre to see Bush reaching out for Democratic votes, but that’s exactly what he was doing yesterday. As the campaign winds down to a few precious days, the president, accompanied by the first lady, drew more than 8,000 supporters to a dusty old hangar at Youngstown-Warren […]