Put this in the good news/bad news category. The Iraqi prison scandal has been so irresistible for the media that Kerry's halting attempts to mount an actual campaign have been ignored. By this point in the election cycle, we would expect the dominant leftwing media to be painting a daily picture of John Kerry as the only possible candidate for President. Daily stories would profile this new JFK, his idealistic message, his impressive vision, the excitement his candidacy has generated and the long list of accomplishments his storied career has produced. Instead, we got one story about blacks and latinos complaining about getting shut out of the campaign, and 24/7 coverage of those prison pictures. Kerry was clearly irrelevant to the news cycle and even the wholly owned mouthpieces of the DNC like the NYT and Washington Post recognized it. Of course, this was not an unmixed blessing for the President, as he struggles to find the right tone to deal with the scandalous pictures. The spinmeisters seemingly have decided to go with "a few bad apples", with the unlucky privates and sergeants who were stupid enough to have their faces photographed being left to collect all the blame. This is clearly only a short term fix, as it is perfectly obvious that these 20 year old high school dropouts could not have arranged the scenes of naked prisoners stacked 12 high on their own, nor would they have dared to do any of this unless such scenes were commonplace in the prison. But the full details will take time to come out, and courtsmartial can be strung out until after the election. What is needed now is yet another diversion to take the news cycle off this diversion. I think an all out assault on the al-Sadr militia might work. No photos please.
Kerry is useless - he has had dream news releases which hurt Bush for the last month, and his poll ratings have hardly budged. I think people see him for what he is - an unprincipled grasping career politician. Basically Kerry cannot win the election - George Bush has to lose it. But GWB is doing a pretty good job at the latter so far!