What do poker and politics have in common?

What do poker and politics have in common? Much, says columnist Mark Steyn, when it comes to George Bush and John Kerry. Steyn says that Bush's poker-playing skills, honed during college, helped him play his cards well while Kerry bet the family farm on his one ace--his four months of service in the Vietnam War.

Now, he says, Kerry is in full retreat--indeed, in seclusion--as his campaign unravels and he takes body shots over his war record, discrepancies regarding his medals, and memory lapses (sometimes called lies) regarding where he was and what he did back then. We have excerpted the column below.

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Kerry is in seclusion, unable to expose himself to any but the most sycophantic interviewers, and getting whumped by hundreds upon hundreds of fellow Swift Boat veterans, plus former POWs, plus retired admirals, over every aspect of his brief stay in the Mekong Delta.

The senator put his money on the wrong war. After a couple of entertaining weeks of the aggrieved Swiftees driving down his poll numbers in battleground states, it seems a shame to interrupt the implosion of the Kerry campaign for the Republican Convention. But I'm sure the seared senator is grateful for the intermission, and for the rest of us the next week affords a rare opportunity in this election campaign to catch up with the issues of the current millennium before the inept Kerry resumes bogging us down in his personal Vietnam quagmire again.

My sense is that the Swiftvets have changed the dynamics of the race. With the candidate's retro braggadocio on ice for the foreseeable future, the Kerry campaign late on Friday revived that old favorite, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, releasing a flow chart full of multi-colored arrows showing that Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is a '''close friend'' of Merrie Spaeth, a public relations consultant to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Yawn.

Meanwhile, ''Bush hatred''--another losing hand the Democrats put too many chips on--has peaked, and any saggy nudists or trust-fund anarchists who succeed in pulling off some camera-worthy stunt in Manhattan this week will only be boosting the president.

Source: Isaac Strahl, Chron Watch