Households are out $1,760 for a war the President says cost Republicans the election, and he told a Lubbock rally, "You'll see Iran in a couple of weeks."

…(cont) September 17 is the day I am told to address. The U.N.'s fact-finding mission found reasonable grounds to believe two of our strikes were war crimes. That same mission found Iran's government committed crimes against humanity against its own citizens, which is the paragraph the other side skips, and I would ask people to read the whole report. The whole report says we hit clearly identifiable civilian sites in Minab and Lamerd, that a hundred and twenty-three children died in the one, that The New York Times has the investigators saying the mistakes that led to the deaths of more than a hundred children "went beyond negligence," and that a second strike the same day killed a reported twenty-two civilians, which is — did I say that? That does not sound like me. The White House came out swinging at the report. That is the posture, and the posture holds.

Fox ran a poll that same Thursday. The headline says seventy-one percent think there is no plan to end the war; the text says seventy percent of voters say the President lacks a clear strategy, and sixty percent now call the military action the wrong decision. I will use the seventy, because a reader checks. In August gas stayed above four dollars a gallon every day of the month for the first time on record, averaging four-oh-eight, ninety cents over the year before. A farmer in North Carolina who voted for us told CBS he was sold a bill of goods and cannot stay in business. One farmer, buying diesel at the price the rest of them pay, which I would rather not have put that way. And the ethics filing released August 27 shows more than a thousand stock transactions in June, some in energy companies posting record profits off the war. That is a disclosure. Disclosure is the system working, which it is, when the man disclosing is the man who started the — the filing is public. Public filings are the point of filings.

Then the close, which I am proud of. On Sunday, October 25, the Vice President sent a letter through Qatari mediators to the secretary of Iran's supreme national security council, offering to restart diplomacy before the vote. On Tuesday, October 27, in Lubbock, the President told a rally, "You'll see Iran in a couple of weeks, if you don't mind." On Monday, November 2, the war was going to end soon, one way or the other, and Qatari mediators went back to Tehran. On November 3 the votes were counted. On November 4 he said the war did it, and that he would do it again. On Friday gas slid toward four dollars and bounced the same day Iran claimed new attacks on ships.

So the line holds. The voters were told the price before the vote and told it again after. I would not call that a loss. I would call it — we lost the House. I would call it candor.