Update: Transcript is now available here .

Hart made some excellent points on O'Reilly tonight.

1. Korea is a bigger threat than Iraq.

2. Bush was evasive on the cost of the war in human lives and in capital.

3. While Bush said that the goal of war in Iraq is disarmament and regime change, last week he and other administration officials said that a goal was to establish a permanent presence to the region and establish a model of democracy throughout the Arab world. If this is the goal, the American people should be told this.

4. There is an alternative to war with Iraq--it is for an intensified U.N. presence with coercive weapons inspections in Iraq, supported by all major nations, which can prevent Iraq from using any weapons of mass destruction.

5. Iraq is not the only country with weapons of mass destruction or access to biological weapons. If it is going to be our policy that each time one of those nations seems to be a real threat, we go in and disarm and do a regime change, we are going to have a very busy 21st century--and we better have a huge military budget. And the American people ought to be advised that this is the policy.

6. We are woefully unprepared for the next terrorist attack here, and there will be one. Both the director of the CIA and the FBI have said if we invade Iraq, the threat goes up. The last major study of our preparedness (in which Hart and Rudman and 15 others participated for the Foreign Relations Security Council) found that we are not much better prepared for an attack here than we were on Sept. 11.

This is not a transcript and we didn't tape the show--so we apologize if we misconstrued any of Senator Hart's points. If you heard differently, or have an opinion, feel free to use the comments section. We will post the transcript when it becomes available tomorrow.

Bump:
Sen. Gary Hart will be on Bill O’Reilly’s The Factor on the Fox News Channel show tonight at 9:00 EST to talk about what the President says during his news conference. He’s appearing live from LA.