My Two Cents II

I guess I'm the only one who didn't think Kerry fought back on flip-flopping. He shouldn't have defended himself; he should have catalogued all the ways Bush has flip-flopped on nation building, the 9/11 commission, the intelligence czar, and so on.

Onto Bush's many weak moments that Kerry might have skewered more but didn't.

1. Bush repeated "hard work" and "mixed messages" so many times I was hoping Kerry would move in for the kill. It didn't take me but a second to come up with one quip: "If George Bush was the captain of the Titanic and he saw an iceberg dead ahead, he'd say we can't change course because that might send a mixed message. When I see a crisis, I'm going to fix it, not pretend it doesn't exist."

2. The dead soldiers -- Bush had the nerve to say he honored dead soldiers. I wanted Kerry to say, "You haven't attended the funeral of one dead soldier that served in Iraq. That's a purely political decision and it's shameful and it certainly doesn't comfort the families.When I'm President, I'll never hide from the very real and very painful human costs of the decisions I make."

3. Trained Iraqi troops -- I couldn't believe Bush said we had 100,000 trained Iraqi troops when both Rumsfeld (90,000) and the State Dept testifying to Congress (50,000 -- depending on how you define trained/fully trained) have given conflicting, lower estimates in the last few days. But I was even more stunned Kerry didn't jump on it as another example of Bush refusing to talk straight with the American people.

4. Bush on the war -- "I get casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is." Everyone's pointed this whopper out already. He's seen by watching TV how hard it is?

5. Bush on never dreaming of going to war in Iraq -- okay, Kerry landed one of his strongest punches by pouncing on Bush's defense of invading Iraq by saying "the enemy attacked us" in the very same response where he said it never occured to him that the President might have to go to war. But really, Bush didn't dream of invading Iraq?

"You didn't dream of invading Iraq when you were running for President? You are surrounded by top aides and advisers who have spent the last decade scheming and dreaming of invading Iraq and then snapping their fingers to turn the Middle East into democracies. Your advisers ahve published papers and given speeches and worked in think tanks devoted to the idea of invading Iraq. They wanted to invade Iraq long before you even decided to run for President. They wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11. If you don't know that many of the people around you dreamed of invading Iraq, then you don't know the people you work with."

But anyway, Kerry looked Presidential and kept it punchy and tight and boy, did we win the post-debate spin.