(Continued below the fold)

Last night's debate was THE moment that Iowans and New Hampshirites had in mind 8 months ago when they picked this man to go up against Bush.  The gravitas.  The seriousness.  The authority on foreign affairs.  The Lincoln look.  The visual and intellectual matchup with Bush.   It's the electability, stupid.

No, Kerry wasn't perfect.  Far from it.  I wish he would have hit Bush harder on neglecting homeland security, and I wish he would have talked less about courting allies and the UN (if I were JK's manager, rule #1 would be Don't say the word France!).

Here are a few themes I would like to see Kerry hit in the remaining debates:

It's rather obvious actually, so apologies if it's already been done.  Here goes below the fold....

No, there's no new threat information, nothing indicating a place, time or method of attack.  But still...

Yet another flip-flop from our chimp-in-chief.  First this "C" student accepts admission to Yale, then he wants to deny any other under-achieving over-privileged sons from having the same opportunity.

President Bush, who followed his father and grandfather to Yale University despite an undistinguished academic record, said Friday that colleges should get rid of "legacy" admission preferences that favor the sons and daughters of alumni.

Link

Why?

It's because I made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We could have had perfect intelligence on all the key pieces of 9/11, but the fact is we lacked -- for the very best of reasons -- people with evil enough imaginations to put those pieces together and realize that 19 young men were going to hijack four airplanes for suicide attacks against our national symbols and kill as many innocent civilians as they could, for no stated reason at all.

Doesn't Senator Frist get it?  Clarke simply couldn't speak out against Administration policy prior to resigning his post at the NSC.  Why?

Ask Paul O'Neill.

Ask Lawrence Lindsey.

Ask General Eric Shinseki.

Ask Richard Foster (the Medicare actuary).

What happens if you speak out against your boss, and your boss happens to be George W. Bush?  You get fired.

Well, one, we didn't put together just the coalition of the willing. A coalition is always a coalition of the willing. And this particular coalition of the willing now has 47 nations; 47 nations are openly members of the coalition, and have asked to be identified with this effort. And there are many other nations that for a variety of reasons don't want to be publicly identified, but are also a part of the coalition of the willing.

Colin Powell, March 16, 2004:

On Sunday, Powell called on Kerry to name the foreign leaders the senator has claimed want him as the next president. "If he can't list names," the secretary told Fox News, "then perhaps he should find something else to talk about."

If this is the best Bush has got to offer, after all the research being done into Kerry's record, he's in trouble.  It barely took a day for the responsible media to swat away this softball.

Turns out that Kerry's bill closely resembled a bipartisan bill that did pass.  Kerry's bill did seek to cut spending - across the board - and that would have included the 1% decrease of $1.5 billion in the intelligence community's estimated 5-year budget of $84 billion.  

Well, someone's gotta try to stand up to wasteful spending in Washington, because the Repubs haven't managed to do so in almost 10 years of Congressional control.

It epitomizes the stubbornness and resistance to change that are the major weaknesses of his Administration.  Plus its pompous, arrogant and ideological, so it would make a perfect campaign slogan for the Shrub!

I think some enterprising congressman should actually propose this!  It would help to make people realize just how hateful and pointless the FMA really is.

By Jim Miklaszewski

With Tuesday's attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq.

But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself -- but never pulled the trigger.

Read the article here

The primary problem facing this country today is that we have a president who cannot see how half the country lives - he refuses to even acknowledge opposing viewpoints and alternative positions.  What we need most now is someone who will truly be a uniter, not a divider.   Only a uniter - someone who has the balls to entertain opposing viewpoints and make compromises for the good of the country - can earn the public's trust and be a leader we all can be proud of.  John Kerry can be that man.