ELEVATING THE TONE:

John Kerry’s stepson, Chris Heinz, 31, displayed his mother Teresa’s famous lack of rhetorical restraint at a recent campaign event with a group of Wharton students. Philadelphia magazine reports: “Heinz accused Kerry’s opponents – ‘our enemies’ – of making the race dirty. ‘We didn’t start out with negative ads calling George Bush a cokehead,’ he said, before adding, ‘I’ll do it now.’ Asked later about it, Heinz said, ‘I have no evidence. He never sold me anything.'” Heinz also reminded writer Sasha Issenberg of Pat Buchanan by saying, “One of the things I’ve noticed is the Israel lobby – the treatment of Israel as the 51st state, sort of a swing state.”

I agree with Duane Patterson that this doesn’t sound like a winning campaign.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has more thoughts on the oblique anti-semitism in Heinz’s remarks. Oblique?

VARIFRANK posts an election-related photo essay.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE has a series on G.I.s and the election, and characterizes Osama’s latest video this way:

Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!

Heh.

GEORGE WILL:

Reasonable people can question the feasibility of Bush’s nation-building and democracy-spreading ambitions. But, having taken up that burden, America cannot prudently, or decently, put it down. The question is: Which candidate will most tenaciously and single-mindedly pursue victory? The answer is: Not John Kerry, who is multiple-minded about most matters.

Tuesday’s winner will not start from scratch but from where we are now, standing with the women of Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Back in Washington recently, Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said those women were warned that Taliban remnants would attack polling places during the Oct. 9 elections. So the women performed the ritual bathing and said the prayers of those facing death. Then, rising at 3 a.m., they trekked an hour to wait in line for the polls to open at 7 a.m. In the province of Kunar an explosion 100 meters from a long line of waiting voters did not cause anyone to leave the line.

Which candidate can be trusted to keep faith with these people? Surely not the man whose party is increasingly influenced by its Michael Moore faction.

Surely not. Meanwhile, read these thoughts on Bush’s alleged incompetence:

Now the one thing that strikes me about the military efforts to date is just how incredibly successful they’ve been, and how masterfully planned and executed they turned out to be. Not perfect, of course (You mean there’s terrorists setting off explosives? Against Americans and their supporters? In the Middle East, no less? Say it isn’t so!). But a lot of the toys that John Kerry voted against turned out to be damned useful in the War on Terror. I don’t want to even think about how an Afghanistan operation with Vietnam-era technology and tactics would have gone for us – I think in that case we’d have been wishing for another Vietnam. And if you’ve ever cracked a history book, you’ll realize that only 1200 deaths in a year and a half of invading a dictatorship, overthrowing its dictator, and fighting a chronic insurgency is astoundingly good news, especially when added to the fact that the long-predicted flood of refugees never materialized, the terrorists that Saddam’s regime had nothing whatsoever to do with suddenly got extremely interested in the fate of Iraq . . . and Iraqis are still signing up to take on the battle for their country against these thugs and getting set to vote in their first-ever real election in a couple of months.

And the Commander-in-Chief at the helm during these amazing accomplishments is called incompetent? You’ve got to be kidding me.

Or someone. Nothing’s perfect, but I think those who expect a mistake-free war haven’t paid much attention to history, and warfare. Or they’re just posturing.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan seems to regard these as “the same old arguments” — but he hasn’t refuted them. Nor can he.

PHOTO BLOGGING: Gerard Van der Leun posts 50 reasons to vote for George W. Bush, in pictures.

THIS WILL SCARE SOME PEOPLE! Courtesy of reader Pamela Barbey.

N.Z. BEAR corrects an erroneous New York Times report regarding his blog rankings, and is politely ignored.

DON’T MISS RON BAILEY’S REPORT on the Foresight Institute’s nanotechnology conference last weekend.

RADICAL BUSH VS. REACTIONARY KERRY: Not the first article to make this point, but it’s made well here. (Via Roger Simon).

IF BUSH LOSES, the press should expect a colossal backlash, as it’s been very obviously in the tank for Kerry. As John Leo observes:

Isn’t this journalistic malpractice?

The open partisanship of big media organizations in trying to hurt Bush and help Kerry — a phenomenon that, as Leo notes, is not limited to CBS and RatherGate, but extends to places like The New York Times — is very troubling. The loss of credibility that results will come back to haunt the press in a lot of ways, no matter who wins. I doubt that, in retrospect, they’ll think it was worth it, but I don’t think it was ever calculated, exactly. I think they just can’t help themselves.

UPDATE: Speaking of which, be sure to read this post by Tom Maguire on the unravelling “missing explosives” story.

DONALD SENSING IS BACK and has thoughts on Osama’s latest video: “Al Qaeda is down. It’s time to kick, kick hard, and keep on kicking until there is nothing left to kick.” Indeed.

UPSIDE DOWN: Immediately after the attacks on September 11 irony was declared one of the casualties. That didn’t pan out. Quite the opposite, in fact. Lawrence F. Kaplan notes in Opinion Journal that liberal Iraqis, “the thousands of academics, lawyers, rights advocates and other educated elites leading the effort to create a new Iraq” overwhelmingly support the re-election of George W. Bush.

WHY THE LEFT NEEDS TO LOOK IN THE MIRROR: I agree. When even Kerry supporters note the similarity between Osama videos and Democratic campaign propaganda, it’s a problem.

UPDATE: A commenter at Michael Totten’s echoes some email I’ve gotten:

Isn’t it just a bit curious that right when Prof. Reynolds leaves the country we get a new video tape of OBL?

I deny all responsibility.

A LATE-BREAKING ELECTION — Michael Barone has thoughts:

We have had close elections before but not usually ones attended by such bitterness and anger. The 1968 race beween Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey and the 1976 race between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter turned out to be very close, closer indeed than expected. But few partisans on the losing side considered the winner unacceptable. That’s not the case today.

In the debates, John Kerry recalled that Bush campaigned in 2000 as a unifier, not a divider, and criticized him for dividing the nation as president. Yet the harshest rhetoric of this long, long campaign season has come not from Bush and the Republicans but from Kerry and the Democrats. Democrats have called Bush and Dick Cheney unpatriotic, not the other way around; Democrats have charged that Bush was ” AWOL” in the Texas Air National Guard; Democrats have claimed that Bush “lied” about Iraq. The Democrats are the opposition party and as such can be expected to attack the incumbent. But they are not conducting a campaign that will make it easy for them to unify the country if they win.

Nor have they been conducting themselves in a way that will make it easy for them to govern. One of the hardest things in politics is to come up with campaign proposals that will help you win the primaries, help you win the general election, and help you govern. Bill Clinton did a good job of this in 1992, though he made a detour on healthcare in 1993-94. George W. Bush also did a good job of this in 2000, although the September 11 attacks led him to refashion foreign policy as no other president has done since Harry Truman in the Cold War. John Kerry has not done such a good job.

I agree, and think that if Kerry should be elected he will find it very difficult to govern effectively. Read the whole thing.

PERHAPS IT WAS 8,000. While most in the media uncritically repeat the results of Lancet study that asserts 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed since the end of the war, Fred Kaplan at Slate takes a meat axe to its methodology. At least two on the anti-war left, Marc Cooper and Matthew Yglesias, are colored convinced.

COCOONING ON THE INTERNET: A MYTH, according to a new Pew poll, which says that wired Americans get more exposure to different points of view. Well, yeah.

IT’S BAD NEWS EVERYWHERE for Osama.

IN WHAT HE CALLS A “MOMENTARY LAPSE OF JUDGMENT,” my brother Jonathan (the history-professor brother, not the rock-and-roll-touring-musician brother) has joined the blogosphere.

UPDATE: If you’ve got a fast connection, you can see a short video segment featuring the rock-and-roll brother (wearing, I should note, my Knoxville World’s Fair t-shirt onstage) here. The band lineup’s changed a bit since I shot this last spring while testing out a new video camera.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Graphic evidence of why it’s better to be a touring rock-and-roll musician than a historian or law professor.

WELCOME BACK, GLENN. Thanks for letting us hang out over here while you were away, and for saying don’t go away yet. This is a bit like having your parents come back from vacation, after you’ve had the run of the house all week. Do you go to your room or stay downstairs? I have the first thing I want to say this morning, and I’m torn about where to put it, but I’ll go ahead and put it here. It’s about Walter Cronkite on “Larry King Live” last night:

KING: Now, bin Laden, of course, could help Bush in that it reminds people of a terror issue in which he runs strong. It also could hurt Bush in that reminds people he’s still alive. So this could be a double edged sword, right?

CRONKITE: Indeed. Indeed. And the thing that in bringing this threat to us, there is almost, in the fact that he dressed well, that he looked well, he was clean shaven, nearly clean shaven as those folks get. It seemed almost, to me, that he wanted to enter into negotiations, that he was really up — he wants to move into a leadership role in international affairs instead of the role of a brigand. And he spoke calmly about this thing. The threat was there, no question about it. He’s delivering a warning to us, no question about that. And certainly, I don’t think there’s any reason to feel that we can take him to our bosom just because this speech at all. He’s perfectly capable of blowing us up.

Yes, we’ll need some more calm talk from the well-groomed — for him! — old rogue before we clasp him in our arms, won’t we? Thanks, Walter. And considering that OBL has a full beard down to his chest, am I to assume you were cracking an ethnic joke when you said “clean shaven, nearly clean shaven as those folks get”?

UPDATE: Several people have emailed me about this part of the Cronkite interview:

So now the question is basically right now, how will this affect the election? And I have a feeling that it could tilt the election a bit. In fact, I’m a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing. The advantage to the Republican side is to get rid of, as a principal subject of the campaigns right now, get rid of the whole problem of the al Qaqaa explosive dump. Right now, that, the last couple of days, has, I think, upset the Republican campaign.

I disagree with people who are saying Cronkite is nuts. I think he was joking. The point is, the bin Laden tape is so helpful to Bush that it is as if Bush partisans are behind it.

LIKE MCARTHUR, I HAVE RETURNED — only without the staged photo-op. Regular blogging will resume later, but I want to thank my guestbloggers for doing such a great job in my absence. Scrolling down, I’m very impressed by what I see. I’ve asked them to continue to drop in occasionally between now and the election — there’s too much going on for me to fly solo, here.

One of my travel-reading books this week was Eric Flint’s The Grantville Gazette, a book of stories in Flint’s alternate-history world that were written by fans; many are quite good. Flint’s introduction explains how he built that world as a collaborative exercise via his publisher’s website, and the whole process sounds a bit, well, bloggy. The result is certainly good. Once again, the line between readers and writers is blurring. And that’s a good thing.

Meanwhile, over at her own blog, Megan McArdle issues her long-awaited Presidential endorsement. “Kerry’s record for the first fifteen years in the senate, before he knew what he needed to say in order to get elected, is not the record of anyone I want within spitting distance of the White House war room. . . . For all the administration’s screw -ups — and there have been many — I’m sticking with the devil I know. George Bush in 2004.”

UNCLE! The Belmont Club says Osama bin Laden’s latest episode of Jihad TV is a thinly disguised surrender proposal – his own surrender, that is.

HALLOWEEN MISCHIEF OF THE POLITICAL KIND. Yeah.

JEALOUS? Do you think there’s any connection between Osama Bin Laden’s releasing a new videotape after all these years and that asinine “Assam the American” tape of a few days ago? Was Osama jealous? Hey, I want to be the scary terrorist guy who swings the election!

My advice to Americans: Vote for whoever you would have voted for anyway!

(VERY) BAD METHODOLOGY: A Lancet study (free registration required) estimates 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the fall of Saddam’s regime. It has since been demolished by Shannon Love.

HANDS OFF THE SNOOZE BUTTON: John Kerry seems to forget elections are won in the center, not on the margins. He sounded like a flailing irrelevant activist today when he told me and everyone else to wake up. Suggesting we’ve all been asleep for four years isn’t the smoothest way to woo the opposition, but I suppose it’s better than accusing us of having false consciousness.