Quickie Post Debate Thoughts

This wasn't a disaster for Bush like the first debate, but Kerry still did a better job. In the background I'm hearing Anne Coulter say that Bush did "an amazingly good job." Is she high? He did an adequate job. Amazing compared to the first debate, maybe, but still well below what one should expect from a sitting President.

Bush lost his temper on the Iraq issue. He threw a hissy fit. He looked like a moron.

Bush said we need to "harvest" our forests. Freudian slip, maybe?

Bush asked the moderator, Charlie Gibson if he "needed wood" which has to be the, well, gayest thing ever said in a Presidential debate.

Bush was confounded about the stem cell research question. There's no excuse for not pursuing this, and he knows it. But, he's pandering to the red states.

On Iraq, Bush uttered a major falsehood. Within the last few days, the CIA released a 1,000 page report about Iraq's desire for weapons of mass destruction. I'm reading the thing for a story but I, obviously, haven't read it all yet. The "key findings" extract does not support Bush's war. The best that can be said is that, in a perfect, by Saddam's standards, world, the sanctions would have been lifted and he could have done whatever he wanted. Well... duh! The logical conclusion to draw from the report is that the sanctions worked. He wanted WMD, but couldn't make them. That was the point of the sanctions.

Kerry didn't hammer some recent news home though. Paul Bremer, Bush's appointed transitional leader of Iraq complained bitterly this week that there were never enough troops on the ground to secure the country. Kerry has a simple argument here: we might have sent enough troops to topple Saddam, but we didn't send enough to deal with the aftermath. He needs to be stronger on this.

Kerry also didn't point out that the jobs report released today said that the country created only 97,000 jobes -- less than half of what economists predicted, based on projections from the White House. He also could have pointed out that 37,000 of those jobs were government jobs, meaning that the private sector is truly still ailing. Don't know why Kerry let him off the hook there.

Ahwile back, Bush was mocked for not being able to identify a single mistake he's made in his Presidency. He was asked to name three tonight. He named none. Kerry should have been humble and named one or two misakes he's made in 20 decades as a Senator. But maybe both of these guys are too arrogant to honestly assess their careers. Too bad, I think kerry could have scored some big humanity points on that one. On the other hand, Kerry did a good job pointing out a major Bush mistake -- the war in Iraq, which never should have happened.