Kerry Agonistes

Kerry seems to be heading for a decisive defeat. His rhetoric is becoming more shrill, even as stories proliferate about his intellectual shallowness and dishonesty. Fox News reported that he's been accused of plagiarizing. The real question now is how far he and his party will go to steal this election. The efforts of his flacks in the press have fallen flat, bringing discredit to them rather than helping him. His whole campaign is looking more and more tawdry in its efforts to find traction in these final days.

Victor Davis Hanson says it better than I can (except for his remark that Kerry has a "razor sharp memory").

I wish I could take satisfaction in the apparent victory in one week, but it reminds me of how effective sophistry still is. I daresay that a large fraction of Americans are sure of a number of things about George Bush that are just nonsense. How many of them really think that Iraq was incompetently fought? Or that Bush is really responsible for all the jobs lost when the 1990s bubble collapsed? Or even that the president has the power to fine tune the economy? If we weren't being so ill served by the news media, we'd understand that the only thing that has reliably spurred the economy is tax cuts because they function through the invisible hand of the marketplace and do so almost immediately. Do they really think that the president can dictate oil prices? Do they realize that living in a free and open society means that things are seldom in the control of anybody?