Trouble is, the rebuttal came a little late in the game. And with all due respect to Fox?s excellent Sunday news show, only a small chunk of the electorate probably saw it.

In the Wall Street Journal on Monday, retired Gen. Michael DeLong -- Tommy Frank?s deputy in charge of the Afghanistan war at CENTCOM -- also rebutted the Kerry charge. He did so even more thoroughly than Hughes. He said the U.S. used a combination of special forces and CIA agents along with native Afghan warlords in a successful operation to dump the Taliban in a matter of weeks, ?a feat which tens of thousands of Soviet troops were unable to accomplish in a matter of years.?

The fact that free elections have just occurred in Afghanistan is clear proof that the U.S. strategy worked. So is the fact that Osama bin Laden?s weak, defensive, almost surrendering video tape proves that the U.S. has crippled the al-Qaeda network. There?s no more talk of world jihad from OBL. Instead, he basically says, ?If the U.S. leaves us alone, we?ll leave you alone.? Of course, we won?t. Eventually, the madman will be killed or captured.

Even Bush?s worst critics concede the Afghanistan saga is a brilliant success. Yet -- for some reason -- President Bush failed to respond head-on to Kerry?s ridiculous Tora Bora outsourcing charge until the very end of the campaign. Actually, the president himself hasn?t yet mentioned the involvement of Delta Force soldiers in the operation. This fact had to come from Hughes and Delong. Why the communications failure to rebut Kerry?s charges? We may never know.

These scary silences have also occurred on the economics front. All campaign long Kerry has flogged Bush on the issue of lost jobs. Using the business survey of non-farm payrolls, Kerry attacked Bush on this issue again and again. It was an effective tactic: The bipartisan blue-chip Battleground poll reports a 51 percent to 40 percent Kerry advantage on job-creation.

Yet there is another jobs survey taken by the Labor Department. It?s called the Current Population Survey of Households and has been measuring unemployment all the way back to 1940. It scores the volume of people actually working, and includes self-employed entrepreneurs, which the payroll survey does not. It paints a much more rosy picture of the current jobs situation.

Rather than a net loss of jobs during the president?s first term, this survey shows that 1.7 million more people are working today than when Bush took office. If you figure in an inherited recession and the economic aftershocks of the 9/11 attacks, the survey shows that 3.4 million more people are working today. The unemployment rate, which is based on the household survey, is at a historically low 5.4 percent. A record level of 140 million Americans are now working.

Yet Bush never once mentioned this other survey. He seldom even mentioned the unemployment rate. He did talk about record home ownership, but he never tied his pro-growth tax cuts to the revival in gross domestic product, which has been rising at a 3.5 percent annual rate since the recession, in line with America?s long-term growth trend.

In other words, the president?s policies have restored American prosperity after unprecedented wartime shocks. Yet these simple facts and figures went largely unused while Kerry?s strong attacks on jobs went largely unanswered.

Just last Friday, the latest report on gross domestic product showed nearly 4 percent growth with very low inflation. Personal incomes are rising by about 5 percent, as is consumer spending. Business firms, which suffered the brunt of the recession, are now spending at a roughly 15 percent annual pace -- yet another sign of solid economic recovery. Continued...