Friday, October 08, 2004

Friday 10/8 links

Anonymous blogger "Mr. Sun," a warm and bright guy, supplies the makings for your DYI (do-it-yourself) "Roll-your-own John Kerry stump speech!" Hilarious stuff, and highly recommended. (Hat tip to "Captain Ed" Morrissey/Captain's Quarters)

Roll Call columnist
Mort Kondracke asks a simple question: "Have the Debates Actually Changed the Race?" And he supplies a simple answer: No.

National Review Online editor
Jonah Goldberg finds just the right word to characterize Kerry-Edwards' stance on Iraq: shameful.

An editorial in The Wall Street Journal suggests that "the real 'coalition of the bribed' was at the U.N."

Instapundit
Glenn Harlan Reynolds: "The real centerpiece of Kerry's foreign policy stance ... has been that he would be better than Bush at getting allies together, and at passing the 'Global Test' before taking military action. And that case is in total collapse this week."

Does al-Qaeda want Pres. Bush to lose the election? If you ask Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, the answer is: "Of course the terrorists want Bush defeated. How can anyone pretend otherwise?" Furthermore, "the terrorists have no particular interest in Kerry. What they care about is Bush. He could be running against a moose, and bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi would be for the moose."

Washington Times guest columnists Lee A. Casey and David B. Rivkin, Jr. argue that Sen. Kerry's "problem is ideological. Mr. Kerry entered politics as part of Democrat Party's anti-war wing, which has consistently viewed the United States as the 'problem' in international affairs, rather than the solution."

The mainstream media complain about the decline of civility in politics. Columnist
Don Feder observes that they only noticed the problem after the right started fighting back.

Syndicated columnist
Debra Saunders puts it in stark terms: "The contrast could not be clearer. ... The choice is clear: commitment or opportunism."

It appears that it is Sen. Kerry's official campaign stance that the US could have rid Iraq of Saddam without the war. Power Line's "Deacon," aka
Paul Mirengoff, provides the details.

John Edwards claimed that Pres. Bush does not know what really is happening in Iraq. Blog satirist "Scrappleface," aka
Scott Ott, has the solution: abolish the CIA and outsource to CNN, so Bush can watch the same news that Edwards is getting.

Classicist
Victor Davis Hanson explains postmodernism, with substantial distaste: "the postmodernist is really a nihilist: all cultures are relative; it is impossible to have objective criteria to say that this is 'bad' or that is 'good.'" And who better than Hanson for "Sizing Up Iraq"?

London Daily Telegraph columnist Sam Leith reports that the BBC has contingency plans in place should Britain gets nuked: play the soundtrack from The Sound of Music for 100 days, or until everyone is dead. Or wants to be dead.