BAD NEWS WEEK....MSNBC analysis: George Bush's real political enemy now isn't so much John Kerry as it is the flow of the news. I think it's worth summarizing just how bad:
Thursday: George Bush gets his butt kicked by John Kerry in the first presidential debate.
Saturday: Partly due to Bush's dismal debate performance, polls indicate that Kerry is catching up. Bush's lead appears to have been reduced to 2-3 points.
Monday: Donald Rumsfeld admits that Saddam Hussein didn't have any substantial ties to al-Qaeda. "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two." After his statement is reported, he tries unsucessfully to claim that he was "misunderstood."
Later Monday:The CIA agrees with Rumsfeld. The linchpin of the administration's case for collaboration between Saddam and al-Qaeda has been Saddam's alleged "harboring" of terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but a CIA report concludes that it probably didn't happen. "The evidence is that Saddam never gave Zarqawi anything," said an official who read the report.
Tuesday: Paul Bremer admits that the administration made a big mistake by not having enough troops in Iraq. "The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation.
When his statement becomes public, Bremer complains that his remarks were "off the record." For its part, the Bush administration tries to claim that Bremer was lying, but is forced to backtrack almost immediately when it becomes apparent that Bremer did ask for more troops as far back as July 2003.
Later Tuesday: Dick Cheney initially appears to fight John Edwards to a near draw in the vice presidential debate, but before long attention shifts to Cheney's numerous and obvious lies during the debate. This is likely to be the consensus post-debate talking point.
Wednesday: Weapons inspector Charles Duelfer releases his final report. He says that Saddam Hussein destroyed all his WMD after 1991, had no WMD programs in place after that, and that his capacity to build WMD was actually deteriorating after 1998, not increasing.
By the way, Andrew Sullivan last night neatly summarized the REALLY bizarre, absolutely inexcusable aspect of the Bush policy in Iraq (although it's been done before):
"Returning to Bremer. One of his early complaints was insufficient troop numbers to stop looting, restore order, AND PROTECT UNGUARDED WEAPON SITES. Leave everything aside and focus on the latter. The war was launched because we feared Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The main fear was that these weapons might be transferred to terrorists who could use them against us. And yet in the invasion, there was little or no effort to secure these sites! And there was no effort to seal the borders to prevent their being exported, or purloined by terrorists. Why? I've long pondered this, but Bremer's gaffe brings it back into focus. Why would you launch a war that failed in its very planning to avoid the disaster that you went to war to prevent? I don't understand. We were lucky in retrospect that Saddam DIDN'T have any WMDs. The way this war has been run, it would have actually increased the chances of such weapons getting to America via terrorists rather than reduced them.
Why did the administration leave weapons sites unguarded for so long? Why did they not send enough troops to secure the borders? I'm still baffled. And rattled. Can anyone explain?"
Well, there are only two possible explanations: either the Administration is mostly composed of absolute idiots, or they KNEW in advance that Saddam really had no WMDs and deliberately lied to Congress and the voters in order to initiate the war. Two rather unpleasant alternatives, unless both explanations are TRUE, wouldn't you say?
So I hear the Department of Homeland Security has just issued an "alert" to security moms, telling them to be aware of suspicious activity around schools, because this might mean a Russian-style hostage incident. No specific information, just "oogie boogie".
There's at least one Republican reaction to the past week of Bad News.
A couple of weeks ago I saw a bumper sticker that said,
