Eric Alterman writes:

Howie Kurtz thought it bad luck for Kerry that he got booted off the TV because of the bomb in Iraq, and a coup for Cheney that cables carried his attack on Kerry via split screen. But wouldn't you call it a PR disaster? As Eric Boehlert points out, while Cheney was telling a partisan crowd at the Reagan Library that the war in Iraq was "making the nation and the world more secure," pictures of a Baghdad inferno flickered simultaneously on U.S. television screens.

Sorry, I'm with Kurtz on this one -- alas. Americans still can't sort all this out -- as the song goes, Americans can't tell you the difference between Iraq and Iran. If they see violence in a Muslim nation, it's terrorism, and if it's by enemies of the U.S., the answer surely must be to get angrier, talk tougher, and wave the flag harder. So even though it's Bush and Cheney's fiasco, they won that news cycle.