This is a video of a speech given by Lara Logan, the CBS reporter assaulted in Tahir Square in Cairo. What she is explaining is that far from the Taliban and Al Qaeda being on the run, they are coming back more powerfully than ever and they are posing an ever greater threat to the West. And she would know, and because she is an absolute insider in media networks, she will have more than a normal level of influence on the coming debates on American foreign policy and not incidentally on media reporting of the Obama administration. I don’t know whether she would have spoken as she does before her horrific personal experience but however she felt then, she is certainly clear eyed today.

There is a quite full report in The Chicago Sun Times with this extended quote from the speech:

Her ominous and frightening message was gleaned from years of covering our wars in the Middle East. She arrived in Chicago on the heels of her Sept. 30 report, ‘The Longest War.’ It examined the Afghanistan conflict and exposed the perils that still confront America, 11 years after 9/11.

Eleven years later, ‘they’ still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.

‘I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .’ Logan declared in her native South African accent.

The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.

‘There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,’ Logan said. It is driven in part by ‘Taliban apologists,’ who claim ‘they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,’ she added sarcastically. ‘It’s such nonsense!’

Logan stepped way out of the ‘objective,’ journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: ‘You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.’

Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.

What a consequential election the Americans are about to have with the right to free contraceptives and saving Big Bird from the private sector the major elements in the Democrat pitch.

Biden is wily and been around the traps for quite a while. He is practised in the art of politics which makes him a formidable opponent and not someone to let one’s guard down against for a moment. Though he lied and misrepresented from one end of the debate to the other, in my remembrance of the time he was more than a match for Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan is new at the game. Ryan has a number of potential problems in front of him – he may be too wonkish, he may sound too much like he intends to slash and burn and he is coming in against an expectation that will work against him if at the end of the night Biden has been able to hold his own. For all that, Ryan understands the issues within an inch of his life and Biden does not. We shall soon see for ourselves.

Friday on SBS at ADST noon.

Maybe, just maybe, the media don’t like to be taken for complete fools. They are partisan to the farthest extent possible, but there comes a time when their integrity becomes so obviously on the line that there is nothing left for them to do but to try to look responsible and honest. The persistent lies by Obama over the attack on the Consulate in Benghazi and the death of the American ambassador are now rightly an issue that only the deeply morally impaired will be able to support the president on. Following the debate, this may be the final death blow for media complicity in a failing election campaign. The media may be – may be – about to get off the Obama campaign bus.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the divide, the current Vice President is taking six days away from the campaign so that he will be able to meet Ryan – perish the thought on equal terms – but so far as the Democrats are concerned, merely not to embarrass their side once again. Of course, having him away from the campaign is the only way to keep him from embarrassing them once again. But next Friday morning the VP debate will be on for us all to see just how excellent the Democrat team really is.

The American election is turning into one of the great comedy moments in history. First there’s this, which is actual intended satire. It is Obama’s debating notes that he kept while at the podium:

But then there’s this, which is from a hilarious article in The Washington Post whose point is, after three pages of boredom, that if Romney is any good at managing, why doesn’t he have more money:

And if he is not a billionaire, doesn’t it suggest that he was not a great private-equity investor after all, thus torpedoing his claim to understand how to create jobs and get the economy back on track?

Something to keep in mind on Nov. 6.

Their idiocy knows no bounds.

Romney also had a set of notes: In the interest of equity and fairness, I should also attach Mitt Romney’s speaker’s notes.

The cartoon is priceless and dedicated to all ye Republicans of little faith. The text is from Hugh Hewitt who puts the current state of play just as I see it myself:

It is a recession, folks, and it is headed this way, accelerated by President Obama’s election year campaigning for growth-killing tax hikes and the promise of energy-production-destroying anti-fracking rules and other EPA job killing moves in December. (The recession has already arrived in the Eurozone.)

The economic reality most people feel is the price at the pumps –double what it was when President Obama took office– and the knowledge that they have of the joblessness of friends and family and the job insecurity they and others worry over. The cluelessness displayed by President Obama on Wednesday night has become the symbol of his entire presidency, and his aimlessness in answering direct questions is what most distressed independent voters who moved so decidedly towards Romney in the Frank Luntz focus group that shocked long-time watchers of such groups.

The huge polling margins that declared Romney a winner in the debate took away a lasting impression of the president because it is consistent with the suspicion that has grown up around the 100+-rounds-of-golf playing Commander-in-Chief, the one who jetted off to raise money on the day the nation learned of the brutal murders of our ambassador and his aides in Benghazi and who then participated in the cover-up of that slaughter.

The wandering-in-answer Obama Wednesday night was the same guy who doesn’t sit down with the press (and now we know why) and who cannot defend his record though offered repeated opportunities to do so by Jim Lehrer.

The takeaway from the first week in October, as the voting begins across the country, is that President Obama was as unprepared for the debate as he was for the presidency.

He isn’t doing his job because he can’t do his job.

The cluelessness President Obama displayed erases any argument that his on-the-job training has equipped him for a second term or earned him a second chance.

It was the worst debate performance by a sitting president in the history of these meetings, and millions who tuned in have now tuned out his appeals for one more chance. Not this time. Not with conditions this serious.

An ad like this doesn’t just look like an ad to me, it looks like what I personally believe. And since I believe this, I couldn’t possibly vote for Obama. And if you believe this too, you shouldn’t vote for Obama either. And if you don’t believe this, where have you been for the past four years?