President Bush on “Meet the Press”

I had taped the Tim Russert interview and finally watched it tonight. The pundits on the Corner are pretty down on Dubya, but I wholeheartedly and respectfully disagree with their assessment. Everybody knows that Bush is no Churchill and his halting style of speech can be…what?...exasperating? But he clearly stated that based on the intelligence available, Saddam Hussein was a threat. After 9/11, can we allow pan-Arab nutjobs like him to continue thumbing his nose at America and the world? No.

Bill Clinton explained away the Democrats’ midterm losses in 2002 as: “When people are uncertain, they’d rather have someone who’s strong and wrong than right and weak.” I submit that the election of 2004 will be based on whether Bush was “strong and wrong” to go into Iraq and whether it makes America safer to depose Saddam Hussein. On the other side will be the Democrats who – and let’s be honest here – would have left Hussein in power to do God knows what, hoping HOPING against all of history, that he wouldn’t do anything to harm America.

James Lileks is right: who do you think Al-Qaeda is rooting for in this election? The guy who stood up against the Taliban, the Husseins, and the Qadaffis? Or the party who criticized the defense of America through the democratization of the Middle East at every turn? In his own garbled way today, Bush made his case and more than ever, I’ll fight for his re-election.