KERRY: I mean, what you ought to be doing and what everybody in America ought to be doing today is not asking me; they ought to be asking the president, What is your plan? What's your plan, Mr. President, to stop these kids from being killed? What's your plan, Mr. President, to get the other countries in there? What's your plan to have 90 percent of the casualties and 90 percent of the cost being carried by America?

IMUS: We're asking you because you want to be president.

"I was just back in my office banging my head on the jukebox," Mr. Imus said. "This is my candidate, and ... I don't know what he's talking about."

I am a disgruntled democrat who will be voting for Bush. I voted for Gore in 2000 and paid very little attention to the Republican primaries in 2000. I had a vague idea that Bush had partied and accomplished nothing well into his 30's. I didn't know he was a pilot until he landed on that aircraft carrier and I didn't really absorb that he was a fighter pilot until this memo scandal. Now I discover that Bush only managed to successfully fly fighter planes for 4 years when he should have done it for 6. Guess what? My opinion of Bush's misspent youth just went up.

IMUS: "Do you think there are any circumstances we should have gone to war in Iraq, any?"

KERRY: "Not under the current circumstances, no. There are none that I see. I voted based on weapons of mass destruction. The President distorted that, and I've said that. I mean, look, I can't be clearer. But I think it was the right vote based on what Saddam Hussein had done, and I think it was the right thing to do to hold him accountable. I've said a hundred times, there was a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. The president chose the wrong way. Can't be more direct than that."

You know, I'm starting to think Kerry really can't be more direct than that. Chalk it up to stupidity, too much beaujolais at lunch, or some sort of cerebral hemorrhage, but I think I believe that Kerry is simply not capable of making a simple declarative statement.