I finally got a chance to watch "This Week". Normally I have better things to do. A couple of things struck me. First, the liberals continually said the "Bush brand" and the "Bush product" when talking about the attempt of the President to both campaign on behalf of GOP candidates and raise money. What they were trying to do is to disparage the GOP campaign by pretending that they are acting as if they are selling soap. In fact what the liberals are worrying about is that the GOP base will turn out to vote in larger numbers--because of the great popularity of Bush--than is normal for off-year elections and/or that the GOP leaning independent vote will turn out in larger numbers than normal. If either one of these two things happen then the GOP will get the Senate back. In case this happens (which is likely, in my view) George Stephanapoulos made sure that he used his last few minutes to warn everyone that GOP Senator Lincoln Chafee might well leave the GOP. Boy George would have had a more interesting (and fairer) point if he would have mentioned that it is equally possible that Democratic Senator Zell Miller might change parties if necessary.

Second, the liberals are hoping that--now that Bush has won Congressional support for his Iraq policy--the "multilateralist" vs. "unilateralist" debate within the admininistration will be re-born. What they mean by multilateral (it turns out) is with the U.N. and what is unilateral means without the U.N. It turns out that it does not matter to the liberals whether or not the administration has built up a coalition (which it has). Acting only under U.N. auspices matters. But this conversation within the White House has already taken place and the good guys won. Besides, as George Will pointed out, the President has a vote in such a debate and he is not a multilateralist and his vote counts for 51 percent. The liberals can keep dreaming (and hoping that Powell will side with them) but the truth is the discussion is over.