JustOneMinute has an excellent recap of NYTrogate here.

After listening to the evolution of NYTrogate all week, including Mr. Kerry's willingness to jump aboard and echo the criticisms that the NYT and CBS have leveled in their coverage, while continuing to hear the Kerry campaign's insistence that UBL was allowed to escape in Tora Bora despite General Franks insistent declaration that UBL wasn't even necessarily there at the time, I'm convinced that Kerry and perhaps Democrats in general don't know or have forgotten what the job of Commander in Chief entails. It's as though Kerry is running to be "Major in Chief", or to channel LBJ's failed Napoleonic attempts to run the Vietnam war from his sandbox in the White House.

I believe that the President has won the hearts of our soldiers precisely because he does not second guess tactical decisions in the theater of operations, and supports those who've made them. The administration has undertaken investigations into mistakes in handling prisoners and Halliburton, and those responsible have been held to account. While war is the ultimate political act, it is never a winning strategy to politicize the acts of the soldiers on the ground. It has been said, and rightly so, that all of the second guessing that has taken place about Iraq and Afghanistan would have rendered us powerless had the same press and pundit "coverage" happened during WWII. Terrible "mistakes" were made, at the cost of many more dead and injured than we have suffered in Iraq. Those mistakes could not have been avoided by more oversight by a man whose combat experience was as a Lt. (Jg.) aboard a river boat full of enlisted men and probably at least one petty officer more experienced than the Lieutenant who kept him from his most egregious mistakes--leaving aside the charges made by the Swift Boat Vets.

Mr. Kerry and his followers in and out of the MSM refuse to acknowledge any of the good that is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, even when it is easily found in the pages of, say, the Wall Street Journal, the blogs of Iraqis who are living their country's transformation or here. They somehow believe that they can overcome the lack of trust that most Americans have for Mr. Kerry's pacifist vacillations by alternately talking tough and criticizing decisions that are far below the Presidential or Cabinet levels. Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld have spoken their discovery of the atrophy of operational practice and protocols in the Defense Department upon their arrival in 2001. Secretary Rumsfeld has embarked upon a transformation effort that is designed to recast our forces, moving the active duty head count around so that more troops--more fighting troops, not REMFs--would be available for deployment, and so that their skills would better match the mission requirements at different stages of a conflict. Mr. Kerry does not speak to this with his Lt. (Jg.) credentials. Instead, he promises 40,000 more troops, and a doubling of our Special Forces. The former may or may not be the right thing to do, but it does not address the problem that the Secretary describes and that we see on TV daily: we are in a civil affairs/government infrastructure rebuilding and pacification/reconstruction effort in much of the country while at the same time using traditional forces to defeat the insurgency in a small region around Fallujah. A new group of 40,000 troops would relieve the latter, perhaps, but not the former. As for the doubling of Special Forces, the former SEAL at Froggy Ruminations has written knowledgeably and eloquently about how difficult that can be. These are special people; of all applicants for SEAL slots, typically only 3% succeed in graduating and joining that most elite of Special Forces. The other Special Forces groups are equally challenging in their mental and physical tests, and selective. It might require 600,000 male applicants over the course of a decade to raise the total number of Special Forces war fighters to 40,000 from ~20,000 today--assuming that we can retain most of the forces that we have now.

If the War on Terror and Iraq are the most important issues in this election as the polls say, then voters have but one choice to make. They must re-elect the President. Mr. Kerry has shown nothing in his record and nothing in his pronouncements in his campaign that establishes that he is in fact competent to lead without attempting to micro-manage the military as well as vacillating in his decisions. A Senator can afford to be deliberative and blow with the wind; his is but one voice and one vote among one hundred. A Mayor of a large city or a Governor must make decisions that affect thousands by his hand alone, and must hire, manage and lead a staff across a broad expanse of disciplines and crises. A sitting President has seen a far broader set of challenges than any Governor ever has. I believe that neither political party can afford to nominate candidates with such a breathtaking lack of operational experience and management ability in the future. More than any of Mr. Kerry's failings, I believe that those skills are his greatest weaknesses. The country cannot afford to attempt to train Mr. Kerry; to convert him from a man for all sides of an issue to a man driven to succeed in an approach he communicates in the same way every day. After 9/11, the world is once again a very dangerous place. UBL's appearance on video this week shows that he believes that Mr. Kerry may just be the man to give Al Qaeda the break it wants to regroup and reform. Mr. Bush will continue to press forward, relentlessly, implacably, just as those brave souls who endured hardships in the founding of our nation, throughout its many trials in war and peace. Mr. Bush is a real American, not a polished patrician. He is just what we need our President to be, right now.