[Reagan Man]

The Pentagon briefing and press conference just held didn't clarify the situation in question. In my judgment, what it has done, is to further complicate matters and allow this issue to grow longer legs and more importantly, stay on the political campaign radar screen through the weekend. Which is exactly what the Kerry campaign and the liberal establishment wanted. That is not good for PresBush. It gives his Kerry and the opposition forces an open ended issue to bash the President with and coming right before the election, that is not good.

[WoodstockCat]

That is not good for PresBush. It gives his Kerry and the opposition forces an open ended issue to bash the President with and coming right before the election, that is not good

Why is Kerry taking it out of his speeches then?

and off his website?

[Howlin]

I agree.

[SheLion]

The Pentagon briefing and press conference just held didn't clarify the situation in question. In my judgment, what it has done, is to further complicate matters and allow this issue to grow longer legs and more importantly, stay on the political campaign radar screen through the weekend. Which is exactly what the Kerry campaign and the liberal establishment wanted. That is not good for PresBush. It gives his Kerry and the opposition forces an open ended issue to bash the President with and coming right before the election, that is not good.

Thoughts?

[GOPRaleigh]

You are SO wrong on this point.

This clearly gives the voter a choice on who do you trust? The MSM (Kerry) or our military (Bush). Checkmate for Bush.

[ambrose]

I hear you, but there are those pundits who say that Bush wins so long as the topic is Iraq and terror, as opposed to domestic issues like Social Security and Flu Vaccines.

[shawngf]

Good God, don't you get tired of wringing your hands and looking for the bad in everything?

Kerry isn't going to want to touch this story with a ten foot pole...it's now severely damaged goods and his moron crew has admitted as much...

[July 4th]

This press conference does nothing except show that John Kerry was completely out of bounds when stating his "facts" earlier this week. It does not tell us what happened.

[Cold Heat]

I tend to see it differently. I see a simple idiotic statement made by the Kerry campaign that somehow we were not in control of that dump and did NOTHING! to secure the explosives and ammo.

This revelation says what we already knew, that we did do things and that the area was secured enough to prevent the removal of 100s of tons of ordinance by enemy forces.

The looting angle does not explain the missing ordinance, but the destruction efforts by the troops plus the Russian repo efforts do lead one to believe the ordinance in question did not fall into enemy hands.

Not a simple cut and dried story, but also not a stake in the heart of the Bush campaign.

It seems to me that the folks most upset about this are republicans on the defensive.

The public does not see this as some major screwup. If the stuff had turned up in car bombs it might be a different story, but as of now, the car bombs have all been based on ersatz collections of arty shells and small aerial bombs looted from 1000s of small dumps that we most certainly missed in urban areas.