Have you ever been to Iowa? Even if not, you know that it’s a middle-size state, smaller than Wisconsin and a little bigger than Arkansas. Now imagine Iowa with over 140 million people, half of the entire US population. Then let’s reroute the Mississippi and Missouri rivers so they both run through Iowa and flood the place so much that most Iowans have to build their homes on stilts. To complete the picture, let’s say these vast swarms of Iowans are as poor and uneducated as Appalachian trailer park folk, and, oh yes - they are Moslem. As you may have guessed, we’re not in Iowa any longer, Toto. We’re in Bangladesh. The only time Bangladesh appears on most of our radar scopes, is when we give a passing glance to yet another story of a flood or typhoon wiping out ten thousand villages, or a ferry sinking with ten thousand people drowned, and so forth. When we think of Moslem countries and terrorist crucibles, other places come to mind like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan. But it’s time to refocus - because there’s a cat fight going on in this land of 140 million Moslem souls that has major implications in the War on Islamofascism.

OK, kids, it’s safe to come out and play now - the Sheriff is back and chased away the scary man.During the second debate, I was so nervous that I drank an entire bottle of wine watching it. For the third, all I had was a glass of water. Kerry got demolished. He looked old. He looked haggard and weary and baggy-eyed tired. His hands trembled, either from nervousness or the onset of Parkinson’s. He droned and babbled statistics. He lost every pro-life Catholic vote in the country and every anti-homosexual “marriage” vote as well. He was constantly on the defensive regarding his pathetic and hyper-liberal Senate record. He reassured no one who doubts his capacity to win the war on Islamofascist terror.Bush looked young, fit, energetic, relaxed, and upbeat. People don’t remember statistics. They remember images and a sound bite or two. The images, not the words, lost it for GW in the first debate, and destroyed it for Kerry in the third. Couple that with lines like, “A plan has to be more than a litany of complaints”; “In the mainstream of American politics, Senator Kerry is way over sitting on the left bank”; and of course, GW’s reply to what men should learn from their wives: “To listen to them.” Just as Bush clinched it with millions of women voters with that response, so Kerry repulsed them with his “cheap and tawdry political trick,” as Lynn Cheney put it, of his invoking her daughter’s homosexuality. Moms all across America now agree with Mrs. Cheney’s assessment: “He is not a good man.”What closes the deal with voters is Bush’s message of optimism, versus Kerry’s being little more than a litany of complaints posing as a “plan.” In virtually every presidential election in American history, the candidate perceived as most optimistic has won. Let that fact sink in. George Bush has nailed John Kerry’s coffin shut.

So now the fate of our country rides on which George Bush will show up in St. Louis tonight, the one we saw in Coral Gables or the one in Wilkes-Barre. If the latter, GW has the capacity to do Kerry in once and for all. To go for the jugular, he could make the following points:

My opponent keeps using the word “truth.” Well, here’s the truth. Our troops who are putting their lives on the line in fighting the war on terrorism in Iraq cannot trust a man who, when he was in uniform, publicly accused his fellow soldiers of war crimes he knew they did not commit. Senator Kerry owes his fellow Vietnam Veterans an apology for calling them war criminals and I expect to hear it right here tonight. America cannot afford such a man as my opponent as her president. America cannot afford a president who is all style and no substance - tall, big hair, deep voice uttering eloquent phrases that constantly contradict each other. It’s all frosting and no cake, folks. America cannot afford a president who has never owned or managed a business, never met a payroll, doesn’t have the slightest clue of how businesses work, never been an employee of a company and hasn’t a clue of what it’s like to work for a living. America cannot afford a president who has no record of accomplishment in 20 years in the Senate. America cannot afford a president who has never held any executive position and never managed any sort of organization, who has done nothing in his 20 years as a Senator except talk -- talk on the Senate floor, talk in speeches, talk to the press, and vote badly, vote consistently in ways that would damage American security.