BRING ON THE SCHADENFREUDE

Item #1: White House Counter Terrorism Director Clark's Massive, Credible, Devastating indictment brought vividly to bear on 60 Minutes. The three key allegations from Clark: Bush ignored Al Qaida before 9/11 when urged repeatedly not to, Bush ordered him personally to keep looking to find a link with Iraq after being told repeatedly there wasn't one, and the US is now less safe as a result of the Iraq war.

Item #2. Bush has just blown $50 mn of his campaign money (about a 1/3, which was $160 mn) - with surprisingly little effect on the polls. Kerry leads or is tied, unless Nader is counted at 6-7% (which is at least 4% higher than the likely actual vote in November, assuming Nader can get on the ballot in key states, which is a major assumption). They shot everything - mostly very general kinds of negative attacks, in this early campaign, and very little stuck. And I expect serious fallout from the Clark allegations as he testifies before the 9/11 commission.

[Meanwhile, "The United Nations' top two weapons experts said Sunday that the invasion of Iraq a year ago was not justified by the evidence in hand at the time. The war, they said, was obviously a family vendetta." OK, I made the second sentence up, but duh. Now if we could just get Perot into the race, this would be really interesting -MoF]