The Ugly Truth

FACT CHECK: As Burns writes in the New York Times: "Stark new videotape broadcast on Thursday by Al Jazeera from Ramadi, an insurgent stronghold 80 miles west of Baghdad, showed heavily armed insurgents taking over a busy city street in broad daylight to celebrate the proclamation by their leaders of an Islamic state in wide areas of Iraq's Sunni heartland. . . .

"The insurgents' ability to strike across wide areas of the country was demonstrated anew on Thursday in the northern oil city of Mosul, when suicide bombers attacked a police station and an American convoy, killing at least 22 people and wounding dozens more, mostly civilians, a hospital official said.

"In the city of Diyala, 40 miles north of Baghdad, a bomb near a market killed 10 people and injured 20 others, an Interior Ministry official said."

And Christopher Bodeen reports this morning for the Associated Press: "The Shiite militia run by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr seized control of a southern Iraqi city on Friday in one of the boldest acts of defiance yet by the country's powerful, unofficial armies, witnesses and police said."

WFLA-TV's Hite, incidentally, wouldn't let Cheney cow him.

" Q Yes, sir. But the purpose of putting additional troops there was to reduce the violence, and instead it has gone up. Therefore, it would seem that our tactic to increase our force in Baghdad has not worked. In fact, it seems to be failing.

"THE VICE PRESIDENT: You can't defeat the enemy, Bob, by withdrawing from them. You can only defeat them by taking them on, and that's exactly what our troops are doing."

Mike Allen and James Carney publish excerpts of their Cheney interview on Time.com today.

"TIME: What do you think a Democratic House would be like?

"CHENEY: Well, I don't expect that to happen. I'm optimistic that we're going to hold both the House and the Senate. . . .

"TIME: There's certainly a lot of talk in Washington that there will be a search for an exit strategy after the election.

"CHENEY: I know what the President thinks. I know what I think. And we're not looking for an exit strategy; we're looking for victory."