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Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Kerry has, and had, the greatest opportunity to broadside Bush with a KO haymaker, and he let it slide...

Bush's mantra, indeed his entire pitch to the public, is that he is the best man to "Get the Iraq mess figured out." That is akin to saying "I made the mess, so I'm the best man to clean it up." That is not a strong argument, not even to the stupidest voter. Kerry could have said "So, Mr. Bush, your argument is that because you took us over the falls, you're most familiar with how to climb back up them" or "Does a company keep a CEO who's run the company into bankruptcy because 'He's most familiar with how the company came to be in such dire straits'?" Of course not. You don't get a medal for rescuing someone from peril you put them in. A Kerry ad should say "Bush is trying to put the American voters between the proverbial rock and hard place by making a huge mess and then arguing that he's the only ,man who can get us out of the mess. Bush may call that plain speaking, but in plain terms, that is called stupid, or worse, cynical and manipulative."

The difficulty with that approach (and I agree it would be an effective one were it not for what I'm about to say), is that Bush refuses to acknowledge that there is even a problem in Iraq. To hear him talk about it, everything is going just swimmingly. Notwithstanding the fact that virtually every news-gathering organization in the world believes Iraq is in complete and utter chaos.