Cheney ..slaps little punk..Edwards..

[cjcj]

Cheney kicked his little ass...IMO..Edwards dodged every question... in typical twisting fashion... Asked directly if He [Edwards and Kerry were in the white house...would Saddam still be in power? the guttless WIMP just could n`t give the answer.. oh well gotto go after a Turkey.

 

[Ithaca 37]

What do the polls show? It seemed fairly close to me, but I only watched the last half hour.

 

[Ithaca 37]

Here's some early poll results. They don't exactly show Edwards getting his ass kicked. In fact, the CBS poll shows Cheney might have a sore ass:

"An ABC News snap poll showed that Vice President Dick Cheney came out on top for 43 percent of the registered voters asked.

Thirty-five percent of respondents said Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards won the debate, and 19 percent of those surveyed called it a tie. Thirty-eight percent of the viewers were Republicans, 31 percent Democrats, the rest independents. (Special Report: America Votes 2004, Poll Tracker)..................

A CBS News poll specifically focused on uncommitted voters and found 41 percent of respondents said they deemed Edwards the winner, 28 percent chose Cheney, and 31 percent said it was a tie.........."

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/06/debate.main/index.html

 

[feclnogn]

Ithaca, DU and the DLC spammed the polls bigtime. DU has pinned at the top of there campaign 2004 section a list of polls + a tutorial of how to defeat them, ie cookies. The DLC and Kerry campaign have sent out email to all of there supporters with marching orders and links to spam polls. Last night after the debate some of the polls were 90 to 10 in favor of edwards and some of these polls had up to 800,000 hits!!!

 

[Moosie]

Hell.. I was one to Spam the poles... Will be Nice to see it 90% in favor or Kerry then they loose because of CHIT polls. Poles suck my pole !!!!!

 

[snake river rufus]

Originally posted by Moosie:
Poles suck my pole !!!!!

Well,,,,I'm shocked!! What , did you wear out paw clod?

 

[JoseCuervo]

The No. 2 man with the No. 1 appeal

October 7, 2004


If John Edwards were the presidential nominee, and not John Kerry, the Democratic ticket would be five points ahead right now.

It's not that Edwards is such a superb debater; the polls show a draw with Dick Cheney on Tuesday night. But if he had won his party's nomination earlier this year, he would have been debating George W. Bush, not Cheney. And though Kerry did well enough in his own debate with Bush last week, Kerry's problem is that he is still Kerry, haunted by his own past, stunted by his own personality.

By contrast, Edwards seems young and fresh. Some say he's a show horse, not a workhorse, but the same charge was made against John F. Kennedy in 1960.

As with JFK 44 years ago, there's an opening for a fresher message. According to the latest Fox News/Opinion Dynamics survey, just 31 percent of Americans think that the economy is "excellent" or "good," while 68 percent think it's "fair" or "poor." So Edwards could be saying, as Kennedy did, "Let's get the country moving again."

Some might protest that the country is already moving. Cheney made a weak case for the economy on Tuesday night. After all, aside from energy issues, what the vice president really cares about is foreign policy. Cheney might have noted, for example, that adjusted-for-inflation after-tax income is up more than 10 percent in the last four years.

And of course, it's easy to peg Kerry as a man who would raise taxes. The term "Taxachusetts" has already been coined to include the home state of Kerry-Kennedy liberalism.

Cheney did better in attacking Edwards as a trial lawyer. He recalled, as one illustration, a Minnesota aircraft manufacturer who said he could hire an additional 200 workers for his factory if it weren't for his tort-liability premiums. But Edwards had his answer: "I'm proud of the work I did on behalf of kids and families against big insurance companies, big drug companies, and big HMOs."

In fact, polls suggest that Americans tend to agree with Edwards' anti-big spiel. A CBS/New York Times survey from July found that 64 percent of Americans think that the government serves "a few big interests," compared to just 28 percent who think the government serves "all the people." It's far from clear, to be sure, that an Edwardsian trial-lawyer-ocracy would serve "all the people," but for now, it's apparent that the American people are receptive to the North Carolina's purported populism.

Which helps explain the weakness of the Bush-Cheney ticket. Having used up most of their rhetorical firepower on the Iraq war, the White Housers find themselves vulnerable on issues that an incumbent, presiding over a rising gross domestic product, should own. According to that same Fox poll, by a margin of 49-45, Americans disapprove of the President's handling of the economy.

Moreover, in spite of all the pro-Iraq war speechifying, Bush is losing that issue, too, 50-45.

Yet one thing seems to be saving Bush: the man he is running against. According to the Fox poll, the incumbent is edging the challenger, 47-45.

For an explanation of this disconnect between issues-polling and candidate-polling, look up "Kerry" in the dictionary, starting with his 1971 testimony trashing fellow Vietnam vets. By contrast, Edwards' entry has only a few lines. As with Kennedy in '60, Edwards' sparse record gives him room to maneuver to the left of Republicans - and to the right.

Indeed, amidst his economic populism on Tuesday night, Edwards said, "It's important for America to confront the situation in Iran, because Iran is an enormous threat to Israel and to the Israeli people." Talk such as that suggests that a President Edwards would be nicely in tune with the neoconservatives who now dominate the Bush administration's Middle East policy. Such saber-rattling reassures many hawks.

But of course, Edwards isn't running for president this year. And he won't be, not until 2008 at the earliest.

 

[Hangar18]

Didn't Edwards use Paul Bremer's recent criticism of troop deployments in Iraq in the debate? I think he did, and most of the media gave him a pass. Not the WSJ.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005720

The Viceroy's Apologia
L. Paul Bremer's selective Iraq history.

Wednesday, October 6, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Former viceroy L. Paul Bremer did 14 months of hard service in Iraq, so it is a special shame to see that he is now squandering that legacy by blaming others for what's gone wrong there. All the more so when he doesn't even have the history right.

That's our reaction to yesterday's political tempest over quotes from Mr. Bremer faulting the Pentagon and Bush Administration for having too few troops in Iraq. To hear Mr. Bremer's version of it, he arrived in Baghdad on May 6, 2003, to find "horrid" looting and instability, and an "atmosphere of lawlessness" that was allowed to grow because "we never had enough troops on the ground" to stop it.

Mr. Bremer revised his remarks slightly late Monday, saying in a statement that "I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq." But in a speech at DePauw University in September, Mr. Bremer said he had frequently raised the troop issue and "should have been more insistent about it," according to the local paper, adding that "the single most important change . . . would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout."


You get the idea: Mr. Bremer isn't to blame because he was tossed into a bad situation that only got worse while his pleas for more troops were ignored. And this indeed would be a damning indictment if it were true. Trouble is, we haven't found a single other senior official involved in the war or its aftermath--in or out of uniform--who attests to Mr. Bremer's version of events.

"I never heard him ask for more troops and he had many opportunities before the President to do so," one senior Administration official tells us. Or to be more precise, Mr. Bremer did finally ask for two more divisions in a June 2004 memo--that is, two weeks prior to his departure and more than a year after he arrived.

We heard about his request at the time, but didn't think much about it after we learned that theater commander General John Abizaid was consulted and argued that it was better policy to train Iraqi forces to fill any void. Judging by our ultimate goal of Iraqi independence, and the success that mixed Iraqi and U.S. battalions had retaking Samarra over the weekend, General Abizaid was right.

For that matter, if lack of troops was a problem, why didn't Mr. Bremer make better and more consistent use of the ones he already had? He was among those officials involved in the mistaken decision to have Marines stop short in Fallujah last April, and he has since defended that publicly.

As for Mr. Bremer's claim that "horrid" conditions prevailed when he arrived in Baghdad, our own Robert Pollock and other reporters who were there attest otherwise. By early May 2003 the major looting was over, and the country was experiencing a postwar honeymoon of sorts. We understand Mr. Bremer's desire to explain why security has since deteriorated, but we aren't going to learn the lessons we need to win this war if we accept the argument that somehow that "looting" was the match that lit the insurgency.


The truth is that the insurgency was already under way. We now know that the Baath Party responded to Iraq's rapid defeat in the conventional war by going underground. And it used that honeymoon period to build its strength--as the "Party of Return"--for the guerrilla campaign that really kicked off in the late summer of 2003. Although plenty of Iraqis warned of this threat, Mr. Bremer clearly underestimated it and failed to take the military and political steps that might have countered it.

On the military side, Mr. Bremer pursued a two-year plan to build an army oriented toward external defense, not internal threats. And once General Abizaid convinced him of the need for an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, Mr. Bremer envisioned it as a garrison force and resisted its use in counter-insurgency operations. He also rebuffed attempts by the Iraqi National Congress and the two major Kurdish parties to supply the Corps with loyal anti-Baathist fighters. When the April violence flared in Fallujah and Najaf, the 36th Battalion of the ICDC--the only one the parties had been allowed to create--was the only one to prove its worth in battle. (The 36th has been fighting with us in recent days in Samarra.)

On the political side, Mr. Bremer underestimated the extent to which putting an early end to the occupation was important. He initially resisted the creation of the Governing Council altogether, and when he allowed it to happen gave it too little power. He also delayed implementing the democracy we had said we came to bring to Iraq, and he ultimately had to be told by Washington to agree to Shiite demands for elections at an earlier date. We're not saying an Iraqi face would have changed everything. But something like the current Allawi interim government could have been created much earlier, with the potential to reveal the insurgency as the Baathist revanchism it is.

As we say, Mr. Bremer was given a tough job in Iraq, and he's taken a lot of unfair criticism for some of the things he did right, such as officially dissolving the Baath Party and other structures of the old regime. But he is hardly helping the cause of victory now by criticizing his former colleagues, especially in a way that obscures the hard lessons we've learned in Iraq in the past 18 months.

Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

[Tom]

I guess about 47 million watched it. Here's the transcript. I missed the end of it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/debatereferee/debate_1005.html

 

[JoseCuervo]

Hangar,

What is Bremer's motivation for making things up at this date?

 

[danr55]

To explain why he wasn't completely successful EG. How does that fit?

 

[JoseCuervo]

DanR,

You sure gotta like the loyalty Dubya inspires??? Bremer would be willing to cost Dubya the election, just to explain why Bremer wasn't 100% susccessful??? Don't think so....

 

[Ithaca 37]

I was thinking the same thing when Bremer opened his mouth. Sounds to me like he wouldn't mind if Dubya gets beat. Maybe he thinks Dubya really put him in an impossible situation to deal with and it could have been a lot better if Dubya had listened to all the warnings about the need for more troops on the ground.

 

[danr55]

EG when you run with those guys, you have to measure EGO by the cubic meter and the metric ton. They will do anything to prevent being "responsible" for a failure.. Not that I know this for a fact, but it fits a lot better than believing Bremmer over the military folks who had to run the show.