TPM Reader DT on whether Allen’s heritage is fair game …

Of course, it’s fair game. Allen has been talking about “heritage” the whole campaign, if not his whole career. He’s used “heritage” as an excuse for his prior (?) worship of the Confederate flag. Even if you believe the nonsense that “macaca” was just some random syllables he bunched together on the stump and that he wasn’t trying to single out the only non-white in attendance, then his only argument is that he was trying to say he was more authentically Virginian than Webb, which is an argument of heritage.

Of course, he’s also wrong on that count, but he can’t say he hasn’t introduced heritage into the campaign.

I would say that the whole line of questioning is reasonable for reasons I noted here last night. But this is part of the mix too.

Gannon/Guckert canned by Washington Blade.

Another holdup for the Bush administration: Arlen Specter says he wants his Judiciary Committee to vote on torture legislation before it goes before the full Senate.

Your GOP racial gaffe of the day, courtesy of Rep. John Kline’s (R-MN) political director.

Defeat breeds more defeat. House Judiciary Committee rejects White House torture bill.

The NRSC drops nearly a million dollars into the Missouri senate race.

Time to hit the Diebold panic button?

From the latest poll from the New York Times …

The Times/CBS News poll also found that President Bush did not improve his own or his party’s standing through the intense campaign of speeches he made and events he attended surrounding the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The speeches were at the heart of a Republican strategy to thrust national security to the forefront in the fall elections.

Mr. Bush’s job approval rating was 37 percent, virtually unchanged from the last Times/CBS News poll, which was conducted in August. On the issue that has been a bulwark for Mr. Bush, 54 percent said they approve of the way he is managing the effort to combat terrorists, again unchanged from last month, though up from earlier this spring.

Republicans continue to hold a slight edge over Democrats on which party is better at dealing with terrorism, though that edge did not grow since last month despite Mr. Bush’s flurry of speeches on national security, including one from the Oval Office on the night of the Sept. 11 anniversary.

…

In the poll, 50 percent of voters said they would support a Democrat in the fall Congressional election, compared with 35 percent who said they would support a Republican. But the poll found that Democrats continued to struggle to offer a case for control of government to be turned over to them; only 38 percent of all respondents said the Democrats have a clear plan for how they would run the country, compared with 45 percent who said the Republicans had offered a clear plan.

So the public is saying, yes, we know what the Republican plan is. But please, please make it end!

It’s hard to know where to begin in trying to disentangle the knot of jingoism, recklessness, bad faith and bamboozlement that is President Bush’s latest boast that if he had good intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts he would send US troops into Pakistan to catch him whether the Pakistanis agreed or not.

On Friday he suggested that he wouldn’t because “Pakistan is a sovereign nation.” And, yes, not invading other countries is a good rule of thumb in most cases, if one this president has tended to honor in the breach. But I think that given the unique history, most presidents and most Americans would be willing to violate another country’s sovereignty if they had actionable intelligence that gave a good chance of successfully capturing OBL.

So on nabbing bin Laden in Pakistan it sounds like the president was against it before he was for it. And as Peter Bergen notes, one of the reasons we don’t have good actionable intelligence on where bin Laden is is that US troops aren’t allowed to operate in Pakistan.

But why debate hypotheticals?

Why do we think President Bush would send troops into Pakistan to get bin Laden without permission when he wouldn’t keep troops in Afghanistan (a country then wholly under American occupation) when we had bin Laden cornered at Tora Bora? The Bush-Cheney campaign was able to bamboozle its way through that net in 2004. But all the information that’s come up over the last two years has confirmed as tightly as it ever can be confirmed that US intelligence knew bin Laden was at Tora Bora trying to make his escape into Pakistan but that President Bush didn’t commit the necessary US manpower to the search because he was shifting priorities and resources to Iraq.

Then, now, before 9/11, it’s always been about Iraq. bin Laden was just a way to get in.

Shorter David Broder: Bush is a lawless president at war with the constitution. Also, Gore and Kerry, who opposed him, are know-it-alls I don’t like. Hopefully Republican moderates and Lieberman can all get reelected so the country can be saved.

The campaign contributions in the final stretch are going to make a very, very big difference. Read this article in the Times.