Here's a CAL posting I made on The Daily Show's "coverage" of Dubya's attempts to deflect on the Al Qaqaa cock-up and a pointer to a great column from the ever-lucid Paul Krugman of the NYT.

First, CAJ-L:

So I watched the Daily Show this evening, as is my habit, and they had a clip of U.S. President George W. Bush saying: "... and a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing all the facts is not someone you want as your commander in chief."

He was trying to deflect attention from the missing high explosives in Iraq.

The Daily Show cut to numerous clips of Dubya making hair-raising claims about Saddam's nuclear (I'm sorry; nuke-u-ler) weapons ambitions, nerve gas and finishing with: "50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm."

A smirking Jon Stewart agreed it would be a bad thing to have someone who jumps to conclusions without knowing all the facts as president.

Here's the NYT's coverage of the story: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/politics/campaign/28bush.html

Try and one reference in it to any of Bush's wild claims about Iraqi WMDs before the war started -- although I can certainly understand why the NYT itself is sensitive on that issue.

For the time-pressed, I'll help you out. There are none.

Why just report Bush's remark Thursday without adding some context to it?

I thought print was the context medium.

Bill Doskoch
Toronto, ON

Here's an excerpt from Krugman's It's not just Al-Qaqaa:

... Al Qaqaa illustrates in a particularly graphic way the failures of Mr. Bush's national security leadership. U.S. soldiers passed through Al Qaqaa, a crucial munitions dump, but were never told that it was important to secure the site. If administration officials object that they couldn't have spared enough troops to guard the site, they're admitting that they went in without enough troops. And the fact that these explosives fell into unknown hands is a perfect example of how the Iraq war has worsened the terrorist threat.

The story of Al Qaqaa has brought out the worst in a campaign dedicated to the proposition that the president is infallible - and that it's always someone else's fault when things go wrong. Here's what Rudy Giuliani said yesterday: "No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough?" Support the troops!

But worst of all from the right's point of view, Al Qaqaa has disrupted the campaign's media strategy. Karl Rove clearly planned to turn the final days of the campaign into a series of "global test" moments - taking something Mr. Kerry said and distorting its meaning, then generating pseudo-controversies that dominate the airwaves. Instead, the news media have spent the last few days discussing substance. And that's very bad news for Mr. Bush.