Good as his word ...

"Nearly 100,000 fully trained <$NoAd$>and equipped Iraqi soldiers, police officers, and other security personnel are working today. And that total will rise to 125,000 by the end of this year. The Iraqi government is on track to build a force of over 200,000 security personnel by the end of next year. With the help of the American military, the training of the Iraqi army is almost halfway complete."

President George W. Bush
News Conference with Prime Minister Allawi
September 23rd, 2004

"There's 100,000 troops trained: police, guard, special units, border patrol. There's going to be 125,000 trained by the end of this year."

President George W. Bush
Presidential Debate
September 30th, 2004

And then this from Reuters, out today ...

But many of these assertions have met with scepticism from key lawmakers, congressional aides and experts, and Pentagon documents, given to lawmakers and obtained by Reuters, paint a more complicated picture.

The documents show that of the nearly 90,000 currently in the police force, only 8,169 have had the full eight-week academy training. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained," and it will be July 2006 before the administration reaches its new goal of a 135,000-strong, fully trained police force.

Six Army battalions have had "initial training," while 57 National Guard battalions, 896 soldiers in each, are still being recruited or "awaiting equipment." Just eight Guard battalions have reached "initial (operating) capability," and the Pentagon acknowledged the Guard's performance has been "uneven."

Training has yet to begin for the 4,800-man civil intervention force, which will help counter a deadly insurgency. And none of the 18,000 border enforcement guards have received any centralised training to date, despite earlier claims they had, according to Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.

They estimated that 22,700 Iraqi personnel have received enough basic training to make them "minimally effective at their tasks," in contrast to the 100,000 figure cited by Bush.

Has any reporter asked the president or his advisors about this? They really do seem to be just making this stuff up ...

Kerry pulls ahead.

According to the first post-debate poll, from Newsweek, John Kerry leads President Bush by a margin of 49% to 46%. Put Nader in the mix and Kerry's margin drops from 3 to 2.

Notably, on the front page of the MSNBC site, the headline reads "Kerry Boost: Poll shows Democrat even with Bush after Debate."

Statistically speaking it's probably fair to call that a tie or basically even. But given how much emphasis has been given to the polls with big Bush leads (Gallup, CBS, etc.) over those with narrow Bush leads (IBD, Fox, Zogby), it seems a funny way to headline the first poll to show Kerry in the lead in like a month.

Late Update: Sheesh! It's worse than I thought. The blurb on the Newsweek poll on the right side of the front page of the MSNBC website reads: "A solid majority of viewers surveyed say the challenger outperformed the president in their first face-off, and Bush's lead among registered voters has all but vanished."

All but vanished? My God. Yes, this is just one poll. Others may well differ. But the article is about the new Newsweek poll that shows Kerry beating Bush among registered voters. So doesn't that mean Bush's lead has all vanished, rather than "all but vanished."

I was never good at math. But isn't MSNBC a bit off on this one?

More good stuff from Fox. Was Cameron in on this one too? Fox News took a Kerry-bashing Republican group called "Communists for Kerry" and interviewed a 'member' of the group as though it were an actual pro-Kerry group.

Sample quote: "Even though he, too, is a capitalist, he supports my socialist values more than President Bush ... The North Koreans are my comrades to a point, and I'm sure they support Comrade Kerry, too."

See Atrios for the details.

A few questions and points about Carl Cameron's Kerry-bashing fabrications on Fox, or A Guide for the Perplexed (media reporters) ...

1. How long did the fabricated quotes run on the Fox News website?

2. Fox News says Cameron has been 'reprimanded.' How? Are there any consequences? What happened to him? How was he reprimanded? Fox spokesman Paul Schur, who first spoke to TPM yesterday afternoon, told The Daily News "We're simply moving on from this, we have no further comment." And that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that the 'reprimand' is anything more than a 'Carl, Don't post any more fabricated quotes on the website.' Meanwhile, Schur declined to tell the LA Times what if any discipline Cameron faced.

3. Just for the sake of discussion, can there be any question that Carl Cameron has contempt and disdain for John Kerry -- contempt and disdain that he has great difficulty keeping a lid on?

4. Shouldn't Cameron be taken off the Kerry campaign beat? Assume for the moment that Cameron's fabricated story wasn't supposed to run on the site. If Cameron sits around writing up phony news stories only for Fox News colleagues which portray Kerry as a swishy fool, can he really credibly cover the campaign as a straight news reporter? The answer is obvious, I think. Of course, he can't.

5. Fox says Cameron made an "error" because of "fatigue and bad judgment." What was the error? Making up the fabricated quotes? Sending a Kerry-bashing parody around to colleagues at Fox News? Posting it on the website as a news story?

6. Did Cameron post the material to the site himself, not realizing there was a problem? Or did a tech person or editor at the website get a hold of Cameron's fabrications and post it not realizing it was a fabrication?

7. How tired is Carl Cameron and will Fox News be requiring him to get more sleep?

8. Why did comments very similar to Cameron's fabrications come up again and again from Fox commentators on debate night?

9. If CNN's John King posted a story on the CNN website with fabricated quotes that had the president joking about funneling money to Halliburton or telling a crowd how only saps went to Vietnam, what would the fall-out or consequences be?

Cuticle Carl?

I will spare you any pretense of mock surprise that Fox News is ridiculously biased against the Kerry campaign. But it's one thing to know it and another to get such a blazing and undeniable example of it as a story with fabricated Kerry-bashing quotes put together by the Fox News reporter covering the Kerry campaign.

(Carl Cameron, the reporter in question, according to Fox spokesman Paul Schur, is Fox's 'chief political correspondent'.)

But it brings up a point raised in an article by Howie Kurtz a few days back.

On Monday Kurtz discussed a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs that showed that Fox News coverage of Kerry was overwhelmingly negative.

Kurtz got these quotes from Cameron's boss Brit Hume ...

Brit Hume, Fox's Washington managing editor, whose "Special Report" was examined by the study, says he's surprised by the anti-Kerry findings. "Our day-in, day-out coverage by Carl Cameron has been extremely fair to Kerry, and the Kerry campaign has recognized this," he says.

"We did a lot on the Swift Boat Veterans. We thought it was a totally legitimate story and found it an appalling lapse by many of our competitive news organizations that were treating that story like it was cancerous." But even there, Hume says, "we were abundantly fair to John Kerry's side."

"Extremely fair" to Kerry? "Abundantly fair" about the Swift Boat stuff?

The same reporter who made up these 'Kerry quotes'?

"Women should like me! I do manicures."

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"

"I'm metrosexual — [Bush's] a cowboy."

Kurtz could do us all a favor and get Hume on the horn to see if he's still willing to call Cameron "extremely fair to Kerry."

Fox News has now posted a retraction and apology for the piece with the fabricated Kerry quotes ...

Earlier Friday, FOXNews.com posted an item purporting to contain quotations from Kerry. The item was based on a reporter’s partial script that had been written in jest and should not have been posted or broadcast. We regret the error, which occurred because of fatigue and bad judgment, not malice.

The only retraction doesn't name the reporter in question, Carl Cameron, which was noted in the statement Fox News gave TPM this afternoon.

Okay some more details on that bogus Kerry story that ran this morning on the Fox News website. As we noted earlier, this morning the front page of the Fox website ran a story with a series of phony Kerry quotes (see post below). After questions were asked the offending material was quickly pulled from the site, without explanation.

So what happened?

Late this afternoon I spoke to Fox spokesman Paul Schur who told me the following ...

“Carl [Cameron] made a stupid mistake which he regrets. And he has been reprimanded for his lapse in judgment. It was a poor attempt at humor.”

So the Fox reporter covering the Kerry campaign puts together this Kerry-bashing parody right out of the RNC playbook with phony quotes intended to peg him as girlish fool and somehow it found its way on the Fox website as a news item.

Imagine that.

More to follow ...

Follow-up to the previous two posts ...

I just placed a call to Fox News in Washington, DC to see if they had any explanation for the fabricated Kerry story they were running this morning on their website.

We're waiting to hear back. We'll update when he hear their explanation.

Howie, are you gonna be following up on this?

Caught red-handed?

This morning on the Fox News website, Fox was running a post-debate story about Kerry with several apparently fabricated quotes meant to disparage the Democratic candidate.

(See the previous post for details.)

Some examples ...

"Women should like me! I do manicures"

About himself and the president: "I'm metrosexual — he's a cowboy."

Now Fox has pulled the article from the front page without explanation. And on the article itself the passages I quoted in the post below have all been removed -- again, without explanation.

[ed. note: I saved a copy of the offending article in its original form. Normally, I'd upload it to the site in .pdf format. But I'm away from my office and without my .pdf making software. I have a copy of it saved in Microsoft's .mht format. So I'll work on getting a copy online.]

So what's the deal here? Where did the fabricated piece come from? Who made up the quotes? How long did it run? Why did it get taken down? What happened?

Is Fox News literally making stuff up out of whole <$NoAd$>cloth about John Kerry?

I don't expect much from this Republican operation. But this does seem to break new ground.

If you go to the front page of the Fox News site, there's a link right there up front to "Trail Tales: What's that Face".

Link through and you find this ...

Rallying supporters in Tampa Friday, Kerry played up his performance in Thursday night's debate, in which many observers agreed the Massachusetts senator outperformed the president.

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!" Kerry said Friday.

With the foreign-policy debate in the history books, Kerry hopes to keep the pressure on and the sense of traction going.

Aides say he will step up attacks on the president in the next few days, and pivot somewhat to the domestic agenda, with a focus on women and abortion rights.

"It's about the Supreme Court. Women should like me! I do manicures," Kerry said.

Kerry still trails in actual horse-race polls, but aides say his performance was strong enough to rally his base and further appeal to voters ready for a change.

"I'm metrosexual — he's a cowboy," the Democratic candidate said of himself and his opponent.

A "metrosexual" is defined as an urbane male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle.

Did Kerry really say that stuff? Stuff that sounds like classic winger parody? I looked around on google and no other reporters seem to have gotten those choice quotes from Senator Kerry. A source on the Kerry campaign told me Kerry certainly didn't say anything remotely like that.

So what's the story from Fox? Are these quotes real? Made up? Unidentified parody? Straight-up fabrications?

So much indecision in the world ...

Last night the Miami Herald and a local TV station put together a panel of eight undecided voters to judge the debate. And as you can see from the lede of the piece in the Herald, one of them wasn't too impressed.

After the debate undecided voter Ted Lyons said Kerry sounded like "an idiot" in his response to several questions.

Then you look down into the article and see that Ted Lyons is a Republican political consultant. (Here he is hanging out with fellow members of the North Dade Republican Club.)

Maybe I've just gotten too cynical and jaded. But was Ted Lyons really undecided?

What the hell was the Herald thinking?

"In Samarra, the Iraqi government has tackled the insurgents who once controlled the city."

Iyad Allawi
Address to Congress
September 23rd, 2004

"U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a major assault Friday to regain control of the insurgent stronghold of Samarra, trading gunfire with rebel fighters as they pushed toward the city center."

Associated Press
October 1st, 2004

You really can't believe a word these guys say.

Remember too that Allawi had a representative of the Bush campaign working on his speech.

From a reader: "The 'hard work' is not getting the casualty report. The 'hard work' is being the casualty."

Another point that the Democrats should hit on mercilessly: "He's isolated."

That might well be an apt description of the president himself. But it was actually his description of Osama bin Laden.

Kerry hit again and again on the fact that the president failed to bag bin Laden in late 2001 and early 2002 in large measure because he started drawing off troops for the coming war in Iraq. He also put the final showdown in the mountains of Tora Bora into the hands of Afghan warlords, or rather their fighters, who had no real interest in taken bin Laden down.

To this President Bush's only response was that bin Laden is "isolated." In other words, he's pinned down and doesn't really matter any more.

Is that really how it is? Then why are we so worried about this terrorism thing?

Wasn't the White House telling us just a couple months ago that bin Laden was personally plotting and directing new attacks on America?

This was a feeble excuse for misplaced priorities. And Democrats should hit hard on it.

Late Update: Greg Wythe has the details. As recently as two months ago, one of the President Bush's top counter-terrorism deputies was telling the public that bin Laden was personally directing plans for a new large scale terrorist attack on the US. But the president says he's "isolated". So it doesn't matter that he botched the manhunt.

Did CNN get scammed by an 'undecided voter' who happens also to be a big muckety-muck in his campus branch of College Republicans? Take a look.

Does someone at CNN have a response they can send in about this?

By the way, I'd be happy to come on as an undecided voter too ...

A there it is. The DNC has up 'Faces of Frustration' -- a compilation of presidential grimaces, moments of pique, agitation, impatience and anger. 'Hey, why do I have to be up? I'm the president! What'd you say about me? I'm the president!'

PS: This is good on quick turnaround. But I think I remember a lot of gestures and grimaces that didn't make it into this video, some of the worst ones I think. Keep this one up. But the vid-wizards at the DNC should have their folks pore over that debate footage for the best stuff and re-edit that tape.

Another angle the Democrats should hit.<$NoAd$>

In various ways last night the president kept coming back to how being president is hard, how Iraq is hard, hard work, really hard, etc.

I see others have already picked up on this. And, for instance, Atrios quotes this passage ...

In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard.

It's-and it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work.

We're making progress. It is hard work.

If one wanted to be ungenerous one might note that what's really hard is being over in Iraq getting shot at every day. But the president did give the impression of being a little worn out.

I think we all know that the presidency is tremendously hard work, even for a president like this one who keeps notoriously light hours. It's amazing to look back at the way the office ages the men who occupy it. But worn out and complaining isn't exactly presidential or an example of strong leadership. No one's making him be president after all. Maybe it's time to move on. He's punched his ticket. He can move on to the next gig.

Perhaps someone can help me with this. But I'm pretty sure both campaigns agreed in advance that they wouldn't use clips from the debate as part of TV ads. But I assume that doesn't mean the DNC can't use them on the site or that independent groups can't use on their sites or even, themselves, use them in ads.

As I noted last night, President Bush's reactions during Sen. Kerry's comments looked really bad. I've heard various people say he looked peevish or irritable or tense of sullen or whatever. But what came through to me most though was that he didn't like being up and hearing himself criticized.

Whatever moods or feelings you ascribe to him, Democrats really need to pick up this ball and run with it and have people see those images again and again because they play to an impression of a man who is out of touch, doesn't like being questioned, petulant, unable to take criticism, as short on temper as on facts. Small, angry and in over his head.

Nervous, unpredictable ... (could I go on and on? Yes, and so should the Dems ...)