Politics Blog

A new CNN/Gallup poll shows the recall at 63 percent and Arnold leading Bustamante 40-25.

-- PoliPundit

Former New York Police Chief Bernard Kerik:

In my four months in Iraq, spent living with, working with, and learning from Iraqi police, I’ve seen things thatwould sicken the worst of minds. In our hunt for the Fedayeen Saddam, Saddam Hussein’s trained assassins, I watched video after video of interrogations of Iraqis whose lives ended with the detonation of a grenade that was tied to the neck or stuffed in the shirt pocket of the victim. I watched the living bodies disintegrate at the pull of the pin. And if that’s not enough, there’s a tape of Saddam sitting and watching one of his military generals being eaten alive by Dobermans because the general’s loyalty was in question.

Why haven’t al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya been given copies of these videos? Publicity blunders like that are precisely why the lying liberal media gets away with painting Iraq as a new Vietnam.

-- PoliPundit

Jeff Greenfield says the California recall polls are junk and that no one is sure of what will happen on October 7.

I agree that therecall polls are junk. I also think that presidential job approval ratings at this stage of the campaign are worthless.

-- PoliPundit

“I never say the same thing every day. I grow every day.”

– Weasel Clark explaining his daily flip-flopping.

-- PoliPundit

Weasel Clark says Republicans are unpatriotic:

They are the party that when I was commanding in Kosovo, they were the party led by Tom Delay against our airman who were in the skies over Yugoslavia taking fire from Serb anti-aircraft and this party voted against them. They claimed they weren’t. They claimed they were voting against just a policy, but I read what they said. They wanted the policy to fail. They didn’t have a vision. They didn’t understand what America was about. They put their interest of the party above the interest of the party [country?]. I’ll never put the interest of the party above the interest of the country.

Remember the uproar last year over the president’s saying the Senate was more interested in special interests than the security of the American people? Tom Daschle went to the floor of the Senate in his pink tie and had a hissy fit.

I wonder if any Republican will have the cojones to call Clark on his outrageous statements. Don’t bet on it.

-- PoliPundit

As soon as Arnold entered the race in August, I predicted that Gray Davis would run a relatively positive campaign:

He’s going to appear at press conferences looking all grave and governor-like, talking about arcane issues and legislation that would bore you to tears. He’s going to run positive commercials extolling his “experience on the issues.”

Any negative campaigning he does will not be against a single opponent, but against the “recall circus.”

So far Davis has stuck to that script. However, he’s now worried enough about Arnold that he’s reverting to form and going negative:

Mr. Davis’s challenge on Friday to debate Mr. Schwarzenegger, and a new television commercial raising doubts about the actor-turned-politician’s competence to run the state, are telltale marks of the new aggressiveness.

“Politicians are either on offense or defense,” one Davis adviser said, “and we have moved to offense.”

-- PoliPundit

New internal Democratic polling shows Gray Davis’ prospects getting worse after the debate. The recall is at 54 percent.

-- PoliPundit

Columnist Jill Stewart on the recall debate:

Wednesday’s debate also revealed something interesting–and potentially crucial–about the relationship between Schwarzenegger and McClintock: The two rivals actually like one another. Reporters were so busy delving into the irrelevancies of whether Arianna Huffington was clever or just bitchy that they nearly overlooked the obvious cordiality between McClintock and Schwarzenegger during and after the debate.

Unlike the lying liberal media, I didn’t.

-- PoliPundit

Rich Galen has the best review of the recall debate I’ve seen so far. He makes the same prediction I did in my review: Barring a meteor strike, Arnold will be governor.

-- PoliPundit

Here’s what Weasel Clark had to say about “unilateral” action just before the Iraq war:

CNN, January 21, 2003: Anchor Leon Harris says to Clark that it has been “widely talked about that you want to be president” and asks him to pretend he is president for the purpose of discussion.

Harris: “You’re being ambushed in the UN Security Council. Support there is waning. . . . What is the next step? What do you do now?”

Clark: “Well, Leon, if I had been in that position [the presidency], I probably wouldn’t have made the moves that got us to this point. But just assuming that we’re here at this point, then I think that the president is going to have to move ahead, despite the fact that the allies have reservations.”

Harris: “You mean move ahead unilaterally?”

Clark: “With whatever coalition we can establish.”

-- PoliPundit