If the Election Was Today ...

And now the most riveting two minutes in television, the latest from the wartime grapevine:

Head to Head With Dean
A new poll out today shows that President Bush's overall approval rating is now 63 percent, the highest of any poll taken since Saddam's capture. In addition, the Gallup Poll shows that, in the wake of Saddam's capture, the president would now beat Democratic front-runner Howard Dean (search) in a head-to-challenge by a landslide 60 percent to 37 percent. President Bush would have beaten Dean by 50 percent to 46 percent last week.

Masked Truth?
Austrian politician Joerg Haider (search) is calling the U.S. capture of Saddam a "second-rate comedy by Americans," claiming the United States may have captured not Saddam Hussein but a double. And some Iraqis agree. A tire repairman in Fallujah insists, "It is someone wearing a Saddam mask." A taxi driver in Baghdad wonders, "Saddam dyes his hair, but after eight months hiding in a hole, it's still black?" And an Iraqi athlete, quoted by the Toronto Globe and Mail, says, "Everybody knows it is not [Saddam]. Why do they keep showing this [on TV]?" Not everyone thinks it wasn't Saddam, though. According to the Al-Rai newspaper in Jordan, a 70-year-old woman there was so overcome by grief after seeing Saddam in captivity that she had a heart attack and then died.

Beantown Banter
Meanwhile, here at home, the following paragraph appeared in the Boston Globe yesterday, written by liberal columnist Derrick Z. Jackson, "With no weapons, no ties and no truth, the capture of Saddam was merely the most massive and irresponsible police raid in modern times. We broke in without a search warrant. Civilian deaths constituted justifiable homicide. America was again above the law. We have taught the next generation that many wrongs equal a right. In arrogance, we boasted, 'We got him!' The shame is that we feel none for how we got him. The capture of this dictator, driven by the poison of lies, turned America itself into a dictator."

Divorced From Reality?
A conservative family advocacy group in Iowa is complaining that a judge is trying to get around the state's Defense of Marriage Act (search), which does not recognize gay marriages from other states, not by allowing gay marriage but by allowing gay divorce. A district court judge last month approved a divorce between two women who were joined in a civil union in Vermont last year and then moved back to Iowa. But the Iowa Liberty and Justice Center is now urging the Iowa Supreme Court to overturn the judge's decision, saying it in effect may recognize gay marriage and "Judges are appointed to rule according to law, not create it."

— FOX News' Michael Levine contributed to this report