PUNDIT ADVICE

Is anybody listening? More than 1,000 dead U.S. soldiers and $132 billion already spent in Iraq, with insurgents in control of key regions. Bunker Boy's latest scare tactics. A record federal budget deficit. Medicare data illegally withheld from Congress. Freshly detailed charges of a 9/11 cover-up by the White House. A Bush the Cokehead scandal brewing, with attendant media caution, and new doubts about his National Guard duty.

How could anybody not be listening? Yet even if they are, it doesn't matter, according to Richard Reeves, who writes: "Forget about this presidential election for the next four weeks. The conventions are over and, as things stand now, the next major wave of political events will begin with the first televised debate between President Bush and Senator John Kerry on September 30 in Coral Gables, Florida. If history is a guide, the election will be settled that night. Or, it will be settled in the second and third debates on October 8 in St. Louis and October 13 in Tempe, Arizona.

I trust Reeves. He's experienced, and he's smart, and he knows what he's talking about. But if he's right, that means until the debates come around the rest of us are just flapping our lips.

Postscript: And yet ... and yet ... listen to Patrick Coburn, of the London Independent, speaking from Baghdad to Democracy Now's Amy Goodman about the significance of the U.S. death toll and the intensification of the war in Iraq.

"We look too much at the number of dead," he says. "We should also look at the number of wounded -- 7,000. And many of these people have suffered terrible wounds, and they would have died in previous wars. People who've lost all their limbs, people who will never move out of wheelchairs in future. ...

"What's very noticeable, and maybe hasn't impressed the outside world, but it's a war on two fronts. American soldiers are dying at the hands of Shiite Muslims, which wasn't true six months ago, as well as these continuing guerrilla attacks by Sunni Muslims." Iraq, he says, "is now a much more potent base for militant Islamic groups than Afghanistan ever was."

Coburn's report is devastating about other developments, too. If American voters put Dummy Boy, Bunker Boy and Rummy Boy back in office for four more years, they can't say they weren't warned.