Call It A Comeback
Because apparently Allawi went off message at home.
Question: Is Allawi and Allawite? The number of folks who can answer this question probably count as Juan Cole, but as long ago delegate to the Model League of Arab States as a Syrian delegate the Allawite’s always fascinated me.
Yeah, the public is egregiously wrong on Iraq and 9/11, but no one ever went broke underestimating the American public.
Mike Barnicle suggesting him and Ben Ginsberg doing things together in the Biblical sense.
I like Joe Scarborough when he is doing analysis and the lighthearted stuff–not on his show. He is incredibly astute at horse race analysis when he’s in that mode (seldom seen on his show) and is a guy you’d like to have a beer with.
He’s having a hard time seeing why the polling isn’t with the pundits on who won the VP debate. Kos has some breakdowns, but my take is that the chattering class–or clattering in the case of those of ‘us’ who use keyboards–like the combat so the Cheney performance was very strong if you want to see two guys go after each other. On the other hand, voters first decide by who the support, but the non-committeds like sunny optimism and that’s John Edwards. I’m pretty sure no one has ever said Dick Cheney is sunny and optimistic.
And I’m not drinking vodka–just Fat Tire Beer–a fine, environmentally friendly brew.
Define met? The thing here is that it was an effective line and clearly scripted from practice. If a bunch of bloggers can figure this out, why didn’t Cheney?
I’m not going to try and be ‘fair’ to the guy after he was called on this on CNBC before and he still said it tonight after asserting the connection previously:
If the Iraqis are better off….as the administration claims, then why would their casualties be relevant to calculation? They’d be losing more if we weren’t there…no?
Just click it. Trust me.
The government’s most definitive account of Iraq’s arms programs, to be released today, will show that Saddam Hussein posed a diminishing threat at the time the United States invaded and did not possess, or have concrete plans to develop, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, U.S. officials said yesterday.
The officials said that the 1,000-page report by Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that Hussein had the desire but not the means to produce unconventional weapons that could threaten his neighbors or the West. President Bush has continued to assert in his campaign stump speech that Iraq had posed “a gathering threat.”
The officials said Duelfer, an experienced former United Nations weapons inspector, found that the state of Hussein’s weapons-development programs and knowledge base was less advanced in 2003, when the war began, than it was in 1998, when international inspectors left Iraq.
From the Transcript:
CHENEY: The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there?s a connection between Iraq and 9/11, but there?s clearly an established Iraqi track record with terror.
Ahem, from the Meet the Press interview:
Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said that Cheney’s “willingness to use speculation and conjecture as facts in public presentations is appalling. It’s astounding.”
In particular, current intelligence officials reiterated yesterday that a reported Prague visit in April 2001 between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent had been discounted by the CIA, which sent former agency Director James R. Woolsey to investigate the claim. Woolsey did not find any evidence to confirm the report, officials said, and President Bush did not include it in the case for war in his State of the Union address last January.
But Cheney, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” cited the report of the meeting as possible evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link and said it was neither confirmed nor discredited, saying
: “We’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.”
For those playing at home, that’s a BIG LIE.
ArchPundit