Rove and Hughes have thrown their BEST at Kerry and he's not only still standing, he's moving forward.
The Bush AWOL mess and the Kitty Kelley book are straight out of the Karl Rove playbook...the truth is less important than the fact that these issues are being discussed by large numbers of voters. You can smell the fear coming off of the Bush camp in waves...look at the anger and venom that has been seeping out of every pore on Matt Lau-whore on the Today Show for the last two mornings. I wonder if tomorrow morning, when he reads the mail from viewers, if he'll read the ones that say "Matt! BUDDY! You're a whore! You're a George W. Bush whore, and you DO play golf with him, because there are photos of both of you on the web, and you're both holding clubs, bee-yatch!"
OH...there's also this:
A staple of Bush's stump speech is his claim that his Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry, has proposed $2 trillion in long-term spending, a figure the Massachusetts senator's campaign calls exaggerated. But the cost of the new tax breaks and spending outlined by Bush at the GOP convention far eclipses that of the Kerry plan.
Bush's pledge to make permanent his tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of 2010 or before, would reduce government revenue by about $1 trillion over 10 years, according to administration estimates. His proposed changes in Social Security to allow younger workers to invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds could cost the government $2 trillion over the coming decade, according to the calculations of independent domestic policy experts.
And Bush's agenda has many costs the administration has not publicly estimated. For instance, Bush said in his speech that he would continue to try to stabilize Iraq and wage war on terrorism. The war in Iraq alone costs $4 billion a month, but the president's annual budget does not reflect that cost.
The White House has declined to provide a full and detailed accounting of the cost of the new agenda. The administration on Thursday provided a partial listing of the proposals, including $74 billion in spending on "opportunity zones" over the next 10 years. But there was no mention of the cost of additional tax cuts and the creation of Social Security private accounts. Discussing his agenda during an "Ask the President" campaign forum in Portsmouth, Ohio, Bush said Friday that he has "explained how we're going to pay for it, and my opponent can't explain it because he doesn't want to tell you he's going to have to tax you."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5993702