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This May Explain It . . .

Ken AshfordJanuary 23, 2004IraqLeave a Comment

Bush-ites are proud to point out that Bush’s military budget is strong and robust, compared to Clinton — who "slashed" it. The best response to that is to point out that even though Bush was CoC, it was essentially "Clinton’s" military that won the Iraqi War. That shuts them up (sometimes).

But there may be other reasons to explain the different budgetary priorities assigned to the military by Clinton and Bush. Although the military, under Clinton, researched ABM technology, they didn’t throw needless dollars into activating a pie-in-the-sky missile defense system that doesn’t work, as the Bush administration seems destined to do. As this article in the Washington Post points out . . .

Dean Implosion

Ken AshfordJanuary 23, 2004Election 2004Leave a Comment

After seeing Dean poke fun at himself on Letterman’s Top Ten list last night, I was willing to give Dean a pass for his histrionics Monday night, and suggest that the jokes about him are becoming a little unfair. But then I read this piece by MSNBC’s Howard Fineman, which begins:

Like the Challenger explosion, the faltering of Howard Dean’s campaign will occupy crash-site investigators for years, maybe decades. How did a guy who rose to front-runner with such a powerful message — the war is wrong, the political system needs profound reform — get so sidetracked between Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl?

The analogy to the Challenger explosion is appropriate. It looks like Dean, too, tends to implode when things get cold. Worse than that, Iowa doesn’t look like a fluke; Dean appears to have a fundamental design flaw — the guy just seems to be lacking an O-ring or two.