Politics Blog

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

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

– Weasel Clark explaining his daily flip-flopping.

— 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

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

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

— PoliPundit

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

— 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

Mickey Kaus has more good stuff on the recall debate.

As for the ten dwarfs debate, it was so horribly boring (maybe I was spoiled by the recall debate) that I couldn’t bear to watch for more than about 30 minutes. Observations from what I saw:

• Weasel Clark is Arnold without the charm and wit. In fact, he’s much more clueless than Arnold. Still, all he needed to do was stand there and not commit a huge gaffe and he did so admirably. However, this debate didn’t do anything to further his putative frontrunner status.
• Nobody attacked Clark (well, Kucinich did, brefly.) While Arnold came off as a pumped-up leader type, Clark looked like a wimp.
• Kerry has taken over Lieberman’s “moderate Democrat” mantle.
• Everyone hates Dean.
• Graham had an unusually low number of “uhhh” and “umms,” but his candidacy died long ago.
• Everyone’s still calling for a tax hike. That may not hurt them now, but just wait for the general election.
• Having ten people on stage makes them look alike. There’s a serious twiddledum-twiddledee problem that hurts any frontrunner and will probably continue to do so.

— PoliPundit

“Angry Virginians Blow Up Power Substation”

— PoliPundit

The Wall Street Journal has posted Weasel Clark’s speech to the Pulaski County Republicans in May, 2001. This one speech could sink his candidacy. Some nuggets of puregold:

We were really helped when President Ronald Reagan came in. I remember noncommissioned officers who were going to retire and they re-enlisted because they believed in President Reagan.

…

And we will always be grateful to President George Bush for that tremendous leadership and statesmanship.

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And do you ever ask why it is the Europeans, the people that make the Mercedes and the BMWs, that got so much money, can’t put some of that money in their own defense programs and they need us to do their defense for them?

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Don’t you ever believe it when you hear foreign leaders making nasty comments about us. That’s them playing to their domestic politics as they misread it.

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We’ve got a great group of men and women in the armed forces. Well, I do want to say that they’re underfunded. I’m going to get to that in a minute. And I also want to say that when they vote, we better count their ballots.

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I’ve met evangelical Christians–missionaries all over the world and seen the tremendous fruit of their efforts. That’s what America stands for.

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And I’m very glad we’ve got the great team in office: men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, DickCheney, Condolzeezza Rice, Paul O’Neill–people I know very well–our president, George W. Bush.

— PoliPundit