Monthly Archives: September 2004

Murphy’s law

Political and media consultant Michael Murphy thinks that the MSM is about to “write a big October comeback story for John Kerry.” Murphy predicts that President Bush will do well in Thursday’s debate, but that the “expectations game and the comback narrative will combine, through the media’s funhouse mirror, to put Kerry back in the race, even though it may ultimately be simply an optical illusion.” I don’t necessarily discount »

Osama: Just Another Liberal

Washington’s Senator Patty Murray is notoriously one of the dimmest bulbs in that body, but she outdid herself when she tried to explain that Osama bin Laden’s popularity in the Arab world was the natural result of his financing the construction of hospitals and day care centers, something America has failed to do. This year, Congressman George Nethercutt is challenging Murray. He saved the heavy artillery until now: this morning »

Old dog, old tricks

Ratherbiased.com (whose site is down now) and Little Green Footballs detail how CBS News last night used discredited documents to attack President Bush: In a story that was a textbook example of slipshod reporting, CBS reporter Richard Schlesinger used debunked internet hoax emails and an unlabeled interest group member to scare viewers into believing that the U.S. government is poised to resume the draft. At the center of Schlesinger »

Kerry fatigue

Patrick Ruffini, the Bush campaign’s webmaster, passes this item along: Appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America today, John Kerry offered yet another explanation for his trademark line “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it”: it was late at night, and he was tired: “It was a very inarticulate way of saying something and I had one of those moments late in the evening when »

Head/hand coordination

Yesterday we sent out the call to Michelle Malkin to comment on the Washington Times story regarding the possible union of Muslim terrorists and Central American gangsters. Michelle has answered the call with “The head-choppers meet the hand-choppers.” »

What I Want to Hear

I’ll be live-blogging the Presidential debate tomorrow night; Deacon and the Trunk may be as well. Some time during the evening, President Bush will be asked about his plan, or maybe his exit strategy, in regard to Iraq. Bush doesn’t talk like Winston Churchill, of course, but in my view, he needs to echo Churchill’s words in the first speech he gave to the House of Commons after assuming office »

Kerry’s Temple Mount

We haven’t returned to the subject of John Kerry’s September 24 speech at Temple University. The speech is Kerry’s most sustained effort to articulate his view of the broader war in which we are engaged. He formulates his view of the broader war as follows: I begin with this belief: The war on terror is as monumental a struggle as the Cold War. Its outcome will determine whether we and »

To Our Readers

When we started this site two and a half years ago, the Trunk said: “The idea that we could ever have any readers for this thing is a pathetic fantasy.” This was after a decade or so of punditry, in which we had published articles in dozens of newspapers and magazines. Fortunately, the Trunk was wrong, and our traffic has grown steadily–in fact, exponentially. The latest surge is due, obviously, »

The worse things are, the better

That was the party line when I was an extreme leftist many years ago, and nothing made me more uncomfortable with being an extreme leftist than that mindset. Christopher Hitchens believes the same mindset infects the Kerry campaign. He writes: “If you calculate that only a disaster of some kind can save your candidate, then you are in danger of harboring a subliminal need for bad news. And it will »

Wrong war, wrong time for Kerry?

Last night, Dick Morris was on television claiming that John Kerry’s Clintonista advisers committed a major blunder by making the war in Iraq the focal point of the Senator’s campaign in the home stretch of the election. Morris’ analysis is always interesting and sometimes correct. When the race was deadlocked early in the year, he predicted that President Bush would pull away in the spring. It didn’t happen then, but »

Deacon Will Hate This

Long-time Power Line readers are aware of Deacon’s irrational attachment to soccer in general, and Everton in particular. Everton is a once-glorious franchise in the English premier league which fell on hard times ten or twenty years ago, and has been trying to avoid “relegation”–demotion to a non-premier league–ever since. Over the last year or two, Everton’s hopes have been buoyed by the fact that teenage sensation Wayne Rooney, the »

Good Economic News

You won’t be reading about this in the New York Times, which is officially committed to a policy of nothing but bad news from now to November 2. But the Commerce Department released some good news tonight: U.S. personal incomes rose 1.5 percent in the second quarter of 2004, the fastest pace of growth in more than three years, as income gains sped up in 33 states, the Commerce Department »

The right war at the right time?

David Rivkin and Lee Casey argue, in the Washington Times, that the Iraqi war is “the right war at the right time.” Their main contention is that the war was necessary “to prove beyond doubt that an international outlaw could not defy American power, and get away with it.” In this regard, they believe that “humbling Saddam was critical to the recovery of American prestige and credibility in a region »

The Democrats Hit Bottom

Of all the contemptible things the Dems have done during this election cycle, the “reinstate the draft” rumor is the most vile. A reader forwarded to us the following email, which is being sent to a countless number of young Americans by the “Rock the Vote” people, an ostensibly non-partisan group: YOU HAVE BEEN DRAFTED! http://action.rockthevote.org/ctt.asp?u=906763&l=4476 This is not a real draft, but a real one may happen soon if »

Plagiarism? What Plagiarism?

On Sunday, we noted that Professor Larry Tribe, the Democratic Party’s top scholar, had been charged with plagiarism by Joseph Bottum of the Weekly Standard, in connection with Tribe’s 1985 book God Save This Honorable Court, which provided the intellectual justification for the Borking of Judge Robert Bork. Professor Tribe lost no time in acknowledging the accuracy of Bottum’s charge, as reported by the Harvard Crimson: Tribe could not be »

Calling Michelle Malkin

The Washington Times reports on al Qaeda’s efforts to exploit our porous border with Mexico: “Al Qaeda seeks ties to local gangs.” We’ll be checking Michelle Malkin for her comments later today. »

Start making sense

At RealClearPolitics Tom Bevan has circled back to examine John Kerry’s support for unilateral military action to remove Saddam Hussein as expressed in a November 1997 Senate speech prompted by the removal of UN weapons inspectors: “The 1997 Senate speech that damns John Kerry.” In the speech Kerry states: “This is not a matter about which there should be any debate in the Security Council or, certainly, in this Nation.” »