Stone Court

I always thought it was evangelical Christians who had a problem with Halloween.

Turns out that witches aren’t too happy about it either.

Go figure.

Dana Milbank has an informative piece on possible scenarios where the Electoral College could fail to produce a winner. (For example, I was not aware that one of Kerry's Ohio electors may be ineligible because he is a congressman, possibly throwing the race to Bush (via the House) if Kerry wins 270-268, though hopefully the elector could be persuaded to resign his House seat if that's what it would take.)

Milbank emphasizes his view that 11 close states will decide the outcome, and that "a computer analysis finds no fewer than 33 combinations in which those 11 states could divide to produce a 269 to 269 electoral tie".

For perspective, there are 2^11 = 1,024 possible scenarios for those 11 states, making the probability of these "33 combinations" about 3%, assuming each state is equally likely to go either way and is independent of the other states. (Of course, neither of those assumptions is realistic, meaning that the "true" probability of a tie could be higher or lower; given the race's uncertainty, "between 1 and 5%" is probably a good estimate, and more meaningful than the number "33" without context.)

Dahlia Lithwick suggests that Bush's replacing Rehnquist might be less than disastrous:

The possibility of Rehnquist stepping down also crystallizes how oversimplified the recent arguments about the power of Supreme Court appointments really are. Suddenly this "four-seats-to-fill-with-whatever-maniac-he-likes" rhetoric is shown to be at least somewhat lacking in nuance. Because if Rehnquist steps down, and President Bush is re-elected, the 5-4 balance on the current court would remain unchanged. In fact, Bush might arguably have a hard time confirming someone as conservative as Rehnquist in the current Senate climate—meaning that the net effect of a retirement could be a more moderate court, even with Bush in office. (Emphasis added.)

While I hope never to have a chance to say "I told you so", Lithwick's optimism is completely unfounded:

First, Bush has never named a moderate to any significant position. (The closest thing to an exception is Christie Whitman at EPA, but EPA is a second-level position and Bush knew he could control her, which he did.)

Second, the most prominent legal official appointed by Bush is John Ashcroft. 'Nuff said.

Third, the actual federal judges appointed by Bush are extremely conservative, including the now infamous Jay Bybee.

Fourth, the small number of Bush judges not confirmed are, if anything, more radically conservative.

Fifth, changing the composition of the Supreme Court is the central goal of Bush's conservative Christian base. There is absolutely no reason to think that he would sell out his core constituency, which he has supported on issues great and small, on their central issue.

Sixth, I would not assume that a new justice could not be more conservative than Rehnquist. While Rehnquist is certainly very conservative, my impression is that he does take seriously the independent power and dignity of the judiciary, a view manifest for example in his splitting from Scalia and Thomas to hold that federal courts did have jurisdiction to hear Yaser Hamdi's due process challenge to his detention. A new judge is more likely to accept Bush's broad view of an imperial presidency unconstrained by the judiciary.

I suspect Bush's strategy for the next justice would mirror the Clarence Thomas appointment, but for another constituency -- pick a young, attractive, ideological conservative who is a woman or Latino/a and has few published writings, and count on the left to be sufficiently split that the nomination squeeks through. The strategy, of course, was previewed with trying to appoint the now withdrawn Miguel Estrada to the D.C. Circuit. If the candidate is too green to be Chief, Bush can always throw the center a bone by elevating O'Connor to Chief as cover for adding another ideologue. (Of course, if Bush feels strong enough in the new Senate, he could make Scalia Chief.) The new judge could sit for 30, 40, or even 50 years.

Rehnquist's retirement would not be a small matter.

The Rasmussen daily tracking poll has been one of the most stable polls, showing a consistently small (1-4%) Bush edge throughout the Bush convention bounce, the Kerry win at the first debate, etc. Today, Kerry is ahead -- by two points -- for the first time in over two months. The tidal wave is coming.

No analogy is perfect, and predictions are a waste of time, but the I'm going to indulge in both because I'm very optimistic about the presidential election.

I have long thought this race resembles 1980 -- an incumbent president dealing with defining failures on both domestic and foreign policy, whose strategy necessarily depends on the argument that the challenger is not fit to govern; a challenger who, after some initial leads, has been unable to pull away from, or even ahead of, the weakened incumbent; and, most important, a enthusiastic, organized, grass-roots movement for change (there, the Christian Coalition, here the less centralized, internet-based movement led by MoveOn, ACT, etc.)

Given that, I thought we'd check in on the Reagan-Carter race. Here's the Times' summary of the state of that race as of the Monday eight days before election day:

Two major new national polls confirmed that President Carter and Ronald Reagan are in a virtual dead heat, with the momentum apparently building on Mr. Carter's side. Released yesterday, the Time magazine poll showed Mr. Carter with 42 percent, Mr. Reagan with 41 percent and John B. Anderson, the independent, with 12 percent.

Dudley Cleneinden, Campaign Report; the Quiet Before the Words, New York Times, Oct. 27, 1980 (via Nexis).

Sounds familiar, no? If anything, Kerry now seems stronger than Reagan then -- and Reagan won in an almost double-digit landslide. Of course, the last Reagan-Carter debate was still to come the following night, and Anderson was artificially holding down Reagan's support. However, the debate -- though it included the now famous "There you go again" line -- was not an obvious turning point until after the fact. See Hedrick Smith, No Clear Winner Apparent; Scene Is Simple and Stark, New York Times, Oct. 29, 1980 ("The Presidential debate produced no knockout blow, no disastrous gaffe and no immediate, undisputed victor. It was a contest of content against style, of a President repeatedly on the attack to put his challenger on the defensive while Ronald Reagan used his calm demeanor to offset Jimmy Carter's contention that he was 'dangerous.'")

I don't expect a Kerry landslide. Half of Reagan's 10-point margin came from Anderson. Give Bush a couple more points for fraud, voter suppression, etc. Kerry: 50.2%, Bush: 48.6%, Nader: .8%, Others: .4%.

Kevin Hayden's insightful rundown on the state of the presidential race led me to the Wisconsin voter registration form, which the Wisconsin GOP has helpfully linked to on its web site.

Hayden's conclusion is that the race will be decided in Wisconsin, Florida, and Minnesota, and that Wisconsin could be swung by last minute registrations by Chicagoans who find a sudden urge to reside in the land of cheese. Whatever opportunity for fraud may have existed, though, has passed. While Wisconsin permits registration until the day before the election, voters must have been residents for at least 10 days, which in this case was two days ago (assuming an attempt to register on November 1).

The form raises another interesting issue: Registering to vote in Wisconsin requires that one not "make or benefit from a bet or wager depending on the result of an election". I bet -- er, suspect -- that many other states have similar requirements. This, of course, brings us back to electronic markets, which permit betting on the presidential election. For a variety of reasons that I will assume are obvious, participants in electronic markets are likely to be disproportionately Republican. If we lose, and the margin in Wisconsin is sufficiently small, we may want to consider a subpoena to IEM and Tradesports to discover whether any of the Wisconsin market participants have voted illegally.

... Derek Jeter would be performing heroics in the Bronx tonight -- or so the electronic markets would have you believe.

Bush's long-standing lead in the electronic markets (he's currently trading at 57.5 on Tradesports and 59.0 on the Iowa Electronic Market) has led to considerable right-wing triumpalism based on the supposed predictive efficiency of "information markets". (Here's a good place to start for information on election markets.)

But don't let that upset you too much -- those same markets totally missed the Red Sox win this week, even when they'd come back to tie the series. Here are the Tradesports prices for the Yankees after Games 3 through 7:

Games --- Price
2-0 --- $0.38
3-0 --- $0.38
3-1 --- $0.47
3-2 --- $0.49
3-3 --- $0.37
3-4 --- $0.00

(The prices are my approximation based on a graph that was available on the site earlier today but has been taken down now since the Yankees are obviously no longer a tradeable security. You can see the Red Sox' side of the equation here. You have to click "MLB.REDSOX" and, when the graph appears, click "Last Week". You will see Red Sox shares trading fairly, though not completely, steadily between 0-3 and 3-3, and the market suddenly waking up Thursday and realizing that the Sox are the favorites to win the series.)

In contrast, note that Yankee fans saw the oncoming train as soon as they lost the first game -- if you doubt that, check out the nascent pessimism in many of the comments to this post.

Our 11-year-old has combined his interests in politics and rap to write a rap for John Edwards:

I'm a nation builder
Son of a miller
Not an oil driller
Like my opponent here
With his big funny ears.
What's his values?
I don't know.
But this President
Has got to go.
Now if you vote for me
I'll be V.P.
Vote J-O-H-N.

Billionaires for Bush ... where are you?

Aaron Brown's lead Iraq story last night:

On to the war in Iraq and a reality check for whoever wins the election. It comes by way of the Pentagon and paints a picture of a growing insurgency funded in part through Syria with lots of money coming from Saudi Arabia. You know the Saudis, our friends and allies in the war on terror.

A reality check for whoever wins the election?

Here are Kerry and Bush from the first debate. Do both of these men seem equally in need of a "reality check"?

KERRY: This president just -- I don't know if he sees what's really happened on there. But it's getting worse by the day. More soldiers killed in June than before. More in July than June. More in August than July. More in September than in August.

And now we see beheadings. And we got weapons of mass destruction crossing the border every single day, and they're blowing people up. And we don't have enough troops there.

...

KERRY: Now, Prime Minister Allawi came here, and he said the terrorists are pouring over the border. That's Allawi's assessment.

The national intelligence assessment that was given to the president in July said, best-case scenario, more of the same of what we see today; worst-case scenario, civil war.

I can do better.

...

BUSH: In Iraq, we saw a threat, and we realized that after September the 11th, we must take threats seriously, before they fully materialize. Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell. America and the world are safer for it.

And yes, I know that Bush said 8,000 times that his job is "hard", but there's no doubt about who's arguing Iraq is going well, and who's not -- nor is there any doubt who needs a "reality check".

Do you remember when having the support of foreign leaders bordered on treason?

"At the very least, we have a right to know what [Kerry] is saying to foreign leaders that makes them so supportive of his candidacy," Vice President Dick Cheney said at a Republican fund-raiser in Arizona.

CNN, 5/6/04.

Not anymore:

We hope and believe that the next president will again be Bush," Berlusconi told reporters during campaigning for Italian local elections on the island of Ischia, in southern Italy.

Reuters, 10/22/04.

I'd also note that -- contrary to the implication of the smear site Foreign Leaders for Kerry -- Bush's endorsement is (as far as I know) the first endorsement for either candidate from a foreign leader with a criminal history.

This morning, CNN broadcast a promotional spot showing three people who say in turn, "I'm a Democrat, and I get my news from CNN! I'm a Republican, and I get my news from CNN! I'm an independent, and I get my news from CNN!" (Words approximate, and I don't recall the order.)

Now why would CNN run an ad like that? Pretty clearly, it supports my hypothesis -- that CNN is very worried about becoming pigeonholed as a news source for Democrats (a circumstance which may explain why CNN apparently scrutinizes its coverage for anti-Bush bias in a way that it does not scrutinize for anti-Kerry bias).

Following that, we had this choice nugget from Jack Cafferty on American Morning:

Sinclair Broadcast retreating now from showing that anti-Kerry film in its entirety. Instead a documentary with excerpts from the film will air on Friday on 40 Sinclair stations.

Investors put the pressure on the company, because the price of Sinclair's shares plummeted when the criticize began. Now Sinclair's saying, well, it never intended to show the whole film. Baloney.

However, Sinclair commentator and vice president Mark Hayman (ph) at one point told "The Washington Post," the movie would air unless Kerry agreed to an interview. And the Washington bureau chief got fired for talking about company business with the media. He called the film biased political propaganda.

Believe what you will, the shareholders aren't the only ones upset. Democrats were howling like wounded geese the minute Sinclair's plans were announced, and don't forget the sponsors. When somebody asked Michael Jordan why he didn't run for political office, he summed the whole thing up, by saying, hey, Republicans buy sneakers, too.

Here's the question, "In a race this tight, is it appropriate for Sinclair to air portions of such a highly partisan film this close to Election Day?

They caved like a house of cards, folded up like a cheap suit.

That's from the CNN transcript. On the air, Cafferty actually said the Democrats were "caterwauling". In any case, "caterwauling" is essentially the feline equivalent of "howling like wounded geese", and both have a clearly negative connotation of annoying whining -- hardly a neutral way to describe objecting to a massive evasion of campaign finance laws. Saying that Sinclair "folded like a cheap suit" makes it sound like poor Sinclair has been deprived of its right to broadcast news by those all powerful (and free-speech-hating liberals), but in fact Sinclair apparently has simply repackaged the broadcast in a more palatable but equally partisan broadcast. To correct Cafferty's sartorial analogy, perhaps Sinclair changed its tie. (In fairness, "baloney" is clearly critical of Sinclair, although again it is also consistent with the story that Sinclair's freedom of speech is being squelched.)

... then the folks who actually understand the statistics would all be Democrats. (Or perhaps this is evidence that baseball is like politics.)

I don't watch CNN that often (usually only when I go to the gym in the morning), so I wondered whether there was a pattern when I noted an anti-Kerry slant two days in a row.

Now, it's three for three. Yesterday morning, I saw CNN's Reliable Sources. The theme of lead sequence was that Bush had won the third debate, but only Fox had said so, while the other networks called it a tie. The question, then: Was this the (non-Fox) media's liberal bias, or its lack of backbone?

HOWARD KURTZ: So Evan Thomas, was the Fox team right, or were the other networks pundits just too wimpy to say who they really thought won?

EVAN THOMAS, NEWSWEEK: Well, Fox team is rooting for Bush. I don't think there's too much question about it. But they were looking -- they chose to narrowly look at one debate, and I think the others were looking at all three debates. And in the context of three debates, it's basically a tie. I think you can make a good argument that Bush won the third debate.

The fact that all of the polls showed Kerry winning the debate was dismissed out of hand. (Laura Ingraham's "I don't put all that much stock in some of these instant polls" went undisputed.) Then, they went on to whether Kerry's comment about Mary Cheney was "cheap", "tawdry", or "odd" before discussing whether journalists are favoring Kerry "deliberately", or just "subconsciously". Now, I don't claim that overnight polls are the last word on who won the debate, but it is rather Orwellian to see a pro-Kerry bias in the media when the polls all say Kerry won but not a single network did so.

Today, Pandagon reports further evidence of CNN's increasing tilt toward Bush. ("CNN's election coverage this morning: show a poll with a hefty Bush lead, interview a Bush flack, tell everyone what the Kerry campaign is saying and thinking. Show a Kerry speech, but only in the background as a reporter talks over it. Cut to a Bush speech, uninterrupted, in a fluff ceremony for Olympians.")

What's going on here? Wasn't it only seven weeks ago that Kurtz was reporting that Democratic voters were heading to CNN, while Republicans were watching Fox? I suspect that CNN is responding to the competition from Fox, and to the risk to its reputation of being described as "liberal", by bending over backward to avoid favoring Kerry. In other words, I suspect it's less that CNN is actively trying to help Bush, and more that its reporting gets scrutinized more closely for anti-Bush bias, meaning that the anti-Bush statements are more likely to get changed before they air than anti-Kerry ones. (Of course, the more cynical among us will suspect overt pressure from the Bush propaganda machine.)

Another part of the story is that Fox's bias is now being treated as a given, like Rush Limbaugh's, and therefore not part of the story. The narrative then becomes: Well, sure, Fox, and Limbaugh, and Hannity, and the Washington Times are all conservative, but they acknowledge that, so the real issue is ferreting out the liberal bias in all other media outlets and concluding that "the media" is liberal. I'd also note that, like Reliable Sources yesterday, these stories are usually based on the "subconscious" beliefs of journalists -- Ingraham claimed on the show, without contradiction, that 85% of reporters are Democrats -- rather than on what is actually on the air. The latter, which is all that matters, is slanting more rightward every day -- at least on CNN.

Today's AP:

With new polls showing the race tied or Bush slightly ahead, both candidates found new ways to go negative while rallying supporters in the campaign's two most crucial states.

Ron Fournier & Deb Riechmann, Bush Says He's Best Protection From Draft (AP).

The statement about the polls is true, but only if one considers only the handful of most recent polls rather than overall trends.

Since Fournier works for AP, I wondered what does the latest AP poll say? Oh my, AP has Kerry tied with registered voters and ahead 50-46 with likely voters. Maybe Fournier wasn't aware of that? No, I guess not. See Ron Fournier, AP poll: Kerry holds small lead over Bush (AP Oct. 7). But that was 10 days ago, so maybe the trend has been to Bush since then? No, guess not again. The average of all tracking polls shows about a 1 point shift to Kerry among both registered and likely voters during the last 10 days.

So maybe Bush is ahead. And maybe the race is tied. But omitting the possibility that Kerry is ahead -- even with the qualifier "new polls showing" -- is misleading.

The last time I criticized Fournier for an anti-Kerry slant, I thought it was probably laziness. That's can't be it this time. May the explanation comes in the last line of today's article: "Associated Press Political Writer Ron Fournier reported from Washington. AP Writer Nedra Pickler contributed to this story." As we know, Pickler is very aware of how misleading it can be to omit some significant fact.

UPDATE: Atrios' latest post on Fournier suggests I am been too generous in suggesting that Pickler's research may be to blame for Fournier's slant.

Lynne Cheney is upset that John Kerry said during the debate that Lynne's daughter, Mary, is a lesbian.

Was this, as Lynne claims, a "cheap and tawdry political trick" designed to appeal to the homophobic vote?

I don't know what was in John Kerry's heart, and I hope that the reference was not some form of gay-baiting. However, judging by his words, I think what Kerry said was completely appropriate. First, the transcript:

Mr. Schieffer: ... Both of you are opposed to gay marriage. But to understand how you have come to that conclusion I want to ask you a more basic question. Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?

[Bush's response omitted.]

Kerry: We're all God's children, Bob, and I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was. She's being who she was born as. I think if you talk to anybody, it's not a choice. I've met people who struggled with this for years, people who were in a marriage, because they were living a sort of convention, and they struggled with it. And I've met wives who are supportive of their husbands or vice versa when they finally sort of broke out and allowed themselves to live who they were, who they felt God had made them. I think we have to respect that....

To start with, I just don't think that the way to win the homophobe vote is to say that we have to respect that gays feel that God made them gay. It seems to me that Kerry's naming Mary Cheney fit logically with his overall theme here, which was to humanize gays to voters who may not have (or realize they have) personal experience with them. Gay people are real people, not just an abstract concept, he seems to be saying. Mary Cheney is germaine to this because she is a well-known lesbian, principally because her father's administration has chosen to make gay bashing a theme of its reelection campaign. Mentioning Mary reminds voters that the gay marriage amendment is the one major issue where Dick Cheney disagrees with Bush. Why is that? Isn't the answer obvious? Kerry is saying: If your daughter were gay, you would agree with me. If you were a compassionate person, you would agree with me. I think those are legitimate messages.

Finally, since Lynne Cheney brought it up, I think it's worth remembering four years ago, when Lynne slammed Cokie Roberts for saying that Mary had "declared she's openly gay" and falsely denied Roberts' statement. Who, then, is really the one saying that there's something wrong with being gay?

Yanks, Sox Exchange Blows

The latest disingenuous Bush attack:

President Bush stepped up his attack on Democratic rival John Kerry on Monday by saying the Massachusetts senator would prefer to reduce terror to an "acceptable level" rather than eradicate it.

Reuters reports that Bush is referring to yesterday's New York Times Magazine article about Kerry. However, though the joys of Nexis, we learn that Kerry never said "acceptable". He did say:

"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance.... It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."

Gosh, might as well just run up the white flag!

The irony of this latest attack is that the candidate who said he wants to reduce terrorism to "acceptable" levels is Mr. Bush:

"I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world. Let's put it that way."

Washington Post, September 1, 2004 (emphasis added).

Even by the standards set by this administration, the hypocrisy is breathtaking.

I'm still willing to assume the CNN omissions are sloppiness rather than perfidy, but now it's two days in a row. This morning, CNN reported that Bush is out delivering his retooled stump speech in the run-up to the second debate, while Kerry is spending the day in debate preparation. Fine so far. Then, CNN observes, "Kerry even has a stand-in for President Bush" (quote approximate, emphasis mine).

Wow. John Kerry must be some kind of uptight, overprepared, elitist geek to need to debate a fake Bush in practice. Good thing Bush doesn't need no stinkin' Kerry stand-ins. Except, of course, he does.

This morning, CNN described the polls on who the debate as split (no transcript, all summaries approximate). That's true so far as it goes, but CNN's explanation of the numbers left a different impression. First, CNN explained that Cheney was perceived as the winner 43% to 35% in as ABC News poll, but it did not mention that the participants were disproportionately Republican. Then, it continued: But in a CBS News poll 41% of the respondents said that Edwards won. And...? No mention of Cheney. Of course, 41% is far less than half, so without the other piece of information, that 28% of the CBS respondents voted for Cheney, CNN left the impression that Edwards had done poorly in that poll as well.

I think this was sloppiness rather than perfidy, but, nonetheless, thus is conventional wisdom manufactured.

Atrios is "of two minds" on bringing back the draft -- he finds it incomprehensible because it would make the country "explode", but also sees it as "unavoidable" given the Iraq quagmire.

I think Atrios is far too optimistic. My suspicion is that the Bush plan is to wait until the next terrorist attack (which they view as inevitable) and then "roll out the new product" in the ensuing patriotic fervor. Even if events force them to go to the draft without the cover of a new attack, I suspect that the draft would no more cause the country to explode than, say, deciding a presidential election based on a court decision that prohibits counting the votes or detaining American citizens without indictment as "unlawful combatants" or "material witnesses" or bribing members of Congress to vote for significant legislation or lying to justify a major war.

In any case, if you want a preview of what the next four years will look like, and whether there will be a draft, if Bush prevails, tonight's debate will be a far better indicator than any of the Bush-Kerry debates. Cheney was actually surprisingly candid in the Lieberman debate about his plans for the last four years:

MODERATOR: ... If Iraq's president Saddam Hussein were found to be developing weapons of mass destruction, Governor Bush has said he would, quote, "Take him out." Would you agree with such a deadly policy?

CHENEY: We might have no other choice. We'll have to see if that happens. The thing about Iraq, of course, was at the end of the war we had pretty well decimated their military. We had put them back in the box, so to speak. We had a strong international coalition raid against them, effective economic sanctions, and an inspection regime was in place under the U.N. and it was able to do a good job of stripping out the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction, the work he had been doing that had not been destroyed during the war in biological and chemical agents, as well as a nuclear program. Unfortunately now we find ourselves in a situation where that started to fray on us, where the coalition now no longer is tied tightly together. Recently the United Arab Emirates have reopened diplomatic relations with Baghdad. The Russians and French are flying commercial airliners back into Baghdad and thumbing their nose at the international sanctions regime. We're in a situation today where our posture with Iraq is weaker than it was at the end of the war. It's unfortunate. I also think it's unfortunate we find ourselves in a position where we don't know for sure what might be transpiring inside Iraq. I certainly hope he's not regenerating that kind of capability, but if he were, if in fact Saddam Hussein were taking steps to try to rebuild nuclear capability or weapons of mass destruction, you would have to give very serious consideration to military action to -- to stop that activity. I don't think you can afford to have a man like Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

My prediction is that the draft will come up and, if it does, Cheney will deny it but specifically reserve an out for further terrorist attacks, even though the need for increasing the size of the military is already apparent because of Iraq.

OK, this is a cheap shot, but:

Paul Schur, a spokesman for the network, said Fox's chief political correspondent Carl Cameron had been disciplined for posting an item on FoxNews.com that included several made-up quotes attributed to Kerry.

"Carl has been reprimanded," Schur said Sunday, defining further comment.

Fox News Channel admits reporter posted fake story about Kerry, Oct. 3, 2004 (AFP) (emphasis added).

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad the Washington Post is fact-checking the debate.

But, as so often happens, the article ends up trumping up charges against Kerry in the interests of balance. On Afghanistan, the Post balances Bush's misleading statement that 10 million Afghanis have registered to vote with the following:

Kerry repeatedly stated that U.S. forces allowed Osama bin Laden to escape during the battle at Tora Bora in 2001 because the administration, he said, "outsourced" the task to Afghan militia leaders. This probably overstates the case -- it is unclear whether bin Laden was at Tora Bora -- but it is true that the Pentagon relied on Afghan proxy forces in an effort to minimize the potential loss of U.S. military lives. Kerry said bin Laden was in Afghanistan, but the intelligence community has always said he was somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

The Post's criticism that "it is unclear whether bin Laden was at Tora Bora" is off the mark for two reasons:

1. While it is not certain that bin Laden was there (though substantial evidence suggests that he was for a period of time), the available intelligence indicated that he was and the Bush Administration believed that he was. They still outsourced the job.

2. Kerry's point was not limited to bin Laden personally, but also to the hardcore al Qaeda fighters who the Bush team allowed to escape:

And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains, with American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world's No. 1 criminal and terrorist. They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords who only, a week earlier, had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other.

As for the charge that "Kerry said bin Laden was in Afghanistan, but the intelligence community has always said he was somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border", the statement is not misleading in context:

And Iraq is not even the center of the focus on the war on terror. The center is Afghanistan .... The president moved the troops there, he's got 10 times the number of troops in Iraq than he has in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden is. Does that mean that Saddam Hussein was 10 times more important than Osama bin - than, excuse me - Saddam Hussein more important than Osama bin Laden? I don't think so.

Kerry's point of course was that we removed troops from a theater in which they could look for bin Laden to one in which they could not. That point is completely accurate and not misleading. Would it have been more "accurate" to say, "in Afghanistan, where they could be deployed to hunt bin Laden", or "in Afghanistan, where bin Laden is, unless he's a few miles away from there, which has some strategic implications, but ones that we can readily deal with through negotiation with Pakistan, although that has been made harder by undercutting moderates in Pakistan by our misguided policy in Iraq"? Sure, in some technical sense. But the statement as delivered was not misleading -- and is no way comparable to Bush claiming that Afghani voter fraud is actually proof of the march of democracy.