Is ANYONE in Charge?

Who's running the Kerry campaign? When the most mockable president in recent memory takes the gambit of mocking Kerry on his Iraq war "problem," and Kerry lets him get away with it, don't we have a slight problem? An article in today's New York Times contains sentences like this: "So far, [Kerry's] aides and advisers concede, he has failed to get his message across."

And this: "It [Kerry's vote to authorize the Iraq war] is a problem that has dogged Mr. Kerry since he walked through the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire, and suffered the barbs of Vermont's former governor, Howard Dean, who made Mr. Kerry's vote to authorize action an issue. Now Mr. Bush has taken up where Dr. Dean left off."

Howard Dean ... trainer extraordinaire for El Presidente? That's salt in the recent wound of watching the Democratic National Committee and the media do in Gov. Dean, who even now is a far more effective counter-puncher than Kerry.

And why is it that the New York Times can point out Bush's glaring weakness and Kerry can't? "...but Mr. Bush has his own problems, since the argument re-ignites the question of whether he rushed to war without a plan about what to do next. It is an issue on which Mr. Bush can still sound defensive. On Wednesday in Albuquerque, he responded to Mr. Kerry's suggestion that the United States could begin pulling troops out of Iraq next year by saying, 'I know what I'm doing when it comes to winning this war, and I'm not going to be sending mixed signals' by discussing pullouts."

"I know what I'm doing when it comes to winning this war." That statement is one of the more mockable lines that this eminently mockable president has uttered over the last three and a half years.

Come on, Kerry!