Republicans have always tried to run on Some Damned Thing. Like Al Gore and the supposed Love Canal story (and others), Kerry's medals, Clinton's affairs, gay marriage, Terry Schiavo.

This one won't work. Kerry isn't running and Iraq is poison for Republicans. Republicans are losing their own base on Iraq. Nobody likes losing and nobody likes being with the losers, which is what the Republicans are now.

If Republicans want to talk about Iraq, Democrats should be happy to oblige them. Nothing about Iraq adds up for the Republicans. They can't add more troops. They can't get the troops out. They can't do anything in Iraq, they're stuck there. Like Kerry says, they should have paid more attention to getting an education.

Per the source, Kerry meant to say that he can't "overstress the importance of a great education" and that "if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy... You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq." Kerry mistakenly dropped the "getting us" from his initial remarks.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2006/10/31/9546.aspx

OK, that makes sense. Other interpretations don't.

Will the media be able to report those two little words?

Whatever he meant to say, he sure didn't say it very well.

It really sounded like he had a brain fart and said something more relevant to the Vietnam war than this one.

In any case, he lost in 2004 and isn't the president. Whether Kerry respects the troops or not isn't going to make much difference to our lives. The fact that George Bush doesn't have a clue what to do in Iraq DOES make a very major difference in our lives, and particularly in the lives of our troops.

This is just a very small potatoe (Quayle sp)for desperate Republicans to chew on in the last week before the election. The only reason it might make a difference is that the Democrats have run a weak campaign and have failed to blast Bush and the Republicans at every opportunity on their massive failures in Iraq.

Why, last week Bush claimed the Democrats didn't know how to win in Iraq. That should have been the Democrats' line against him. Now he doesn't even have to steal it.

Noam Chomsky isn't a Democrat. Michael Moore isn't really one either. He's a reformed Nader voter, at best.

Far from being hijacked by the extreme left, the Democrats have been hijacked by political consultants who tell them not to say anything lest they offend someone.

That's why I asked earlier, who are those liberal Democrats who Paglia claims are 'constantly' making snide remarks against religion? Is it Hillary, Kerry, Kennedy, Lieberman, Feingold? Was it Carter, Mondale, Clinton, Dukakis? Was it McGovern, years and years ago? I certainly cannot imagine any Democrat these days making a controversial statement, so I don't know who Paglia is talking about.

Which liberal Democrats are constantly 'sniping' at religion? Which liberal Democrats have EVER sniped at religion? Could we have quotes and names, please?

And did the Democrats really have anything to do with 'Foleygate?' Seems like it was the media that went crazy over Foley, not the Democrats.

I do agree that Foleygate doesn't help the Democrats at all and the Democrats should have put Iraq front and center in this campaign.

...it means they don't care enough to tell us about it.

I'm tired of making excuses for the Democrats.

I'm tired of hearing that Republicans run everything and will steal the election.

Democrats need to start being proactive instead of reactive. We need to set an agenda, get our message out, and inspire our voters. Otherwise we have nothing to complain about.

Delusional and unworried? That sounds more like the Democrats.

He knows that Congressional districts are heavily padded in favor of Republicans. Says Bruce Reed at Slate:

Attention, conspiracy theorists: The biggest conspiracy to steal votes already happened. It's called redistricting, and it offers Republicans' only real hope of holding onto the House this fall.

http://www.slate.com/id/2151647#CantLose

He knows the Christian conservative movement might still produce a miracle for the Republicans in a mid term election.

He knows Democrats have problems getting their vote out and that polls favoring Democrats could encourage Democrats to stay home if they expect the election to be in the bag.

He knows that Democrats are uninspiring to the voters and have no coherent agenda for a Democratic congress.

What worries me is not that he's unworried, it worries me that Democrats are unworried. Nowhere do I feel any sense of urgency from the Democrats this year. And I can't understand why.

...beleive in the bedrock principles of the scientific method. They believe in testing, experiment, verification.

And they know many, many things as facts. Scientists know that you can't get something for nothing. That everything eventually runs down. That all life evolves, including humans. That E = mc squared. Many people happend to consider scientists as dogmatic party poopers who don't know as much as they think they know.

But in fact, scientists are people who know what they think and why they think it. Scientists are curious people who study facts and then attempt to draw conclusions from those facts.

Many people on the left, OTOH, don't seem to be interested in looking at facts. They seem to actively recoil from drawing conclusions. They think what they think, but they don't want to know why they think it. They seem to get angry if you suggest there might a better way for liberals to think, because that seems to imply that liberals don't already know everything there is to know. I think that's why it's so hard to get Democrats to recognize that they don't seem to stand for anything. Democrats don't really want to stand for anything, they want to try to stand for everything. Otherwise they would have to try to draw conclusions, and they don't want to do that.