What a Bunch of Qa Qaa

A cold has got me down today, so I'm staying home.

This afforded me the rare opportunity to see the Pentagon press conference on the missing explosives. It didn't explain anything other than the guy blew up 250 tons of ammunition. Other than that, the Pentagon is still investigating.

But the KSTP video didn't do any better job explaining that the explosives were still in the bunkers. There were IAEA seals, but you can't tell if they were at Al Qa Qaa, you can't tell if there was anything still in the bunker, and you can't tell if the stuff that they did show was RDX or HMX. So nothing definitive there, either.

This story is a waste of time. If you aren't already decided, I can't see how this is going to change your overall view of the candidates. "President Bush didn't secure 1/1000th of the total ammunitions in Iraq, oh, then I won't vote for him." "John Kerry is peddling a story without all the facts, can't give him my vote."

If this was the last ditch effort by the Democrats to question President Bush's leadership, it has devolved into a mess of technical facts that are in dispute. My attention waned at the Pentagon's press conference when the Major told me what he did for a living and how he traveled from a place called Dogwood to Elms. If the Pentagon is defending its Commander-in-Chief, it is doing so through attrition - throw out technical words and get the press hung up on the technicalities of the situation for a few days and by then the election is over.

If the Kerry campaign has another trick up its sleeve, it has to decide if it will trump this Qa Qaa story. Whatever they throw out in the next day or two (presumably over the weekend so that the news cycle favors the MSM), it had better be more damaging than this one, as it will push Al Qa Qaa off the front pages and out of everyone's minds.