London Times Column Suggests Kerry Might Be Rove's "Manchurian candidate"

--Written from London

The British papers can be so much more entertaining than the big American ones. They don't always take everything seriously.

Take today's London Times. It has a wonderful column by Gerard Baker suggesting that Sen. John Kerry might be a "Manchurian candidate" engineered by Karl Rove to sabotage the Democratic party.

"It seems entirely possible that at some point in his career, he was seized by a youthful Karl Rove, brainwashed and programmed to kill off, at crucial moments in American history, the Democratic party's political prospects," Baker writes.

This first became evident in 2004, he adds, when Kerry snatched defeat from Democratic victory prospects against President Bush, and has just been proved by Kerry's joke besmirching American troops fighting in Iraq.

Sounds quite reasonable to me.

The London Times also has a good article speculating on the critical ramifications for Prime Minister Tony Blair should the Republicans lose on Tuesday.

My flight to London on United Airlines business class at a discounted rate wasn't bad. I recommend it. Today, when I arrived, was an unusual day in London, bright and sunny. But I quickly proved to myself that the chances of getting really bad food here in Britain haven't been diminished, when I ordered "French" onion soup and got something that was an insult to France.