When unique visitors to HughHewitt.com crashes through 125,000 on a single day, I know the public is engaged.

That's what happened yesterday, and my guess is that Townhall.com traffic was also off the charts.

Election days usually see such spikes as information junkies hunt for bits and pieces of intel.

And yesterday's numbers were no doubt helped along by lefties eager to read my interviews with Mark Halperin of ABC News. (Interview one here and interview two here.) Halperin and co-author John Harris have written a book, The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008, and was eager to promote it while talking politics with me. We disagreed sharply on many issues though the long conversation was for the most part very civil, and the left was as a result feverish beyond belief and fired with rage against Halperin. Generated a lot of traffic too.

But that doesn’t explain the Wednesday surge. The surge was Kerry's doing.

During the day I posted often on Kerry's slander of the military, including here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and finally here. So did Dean Barnett, here and here.

I did so because the e-mails kept arriving from members of the military on active duty as well as their family and friends, as well as veterans.

I posted as much of the flow as I could while at the same time broadcasting and meeting deadlines. I managed to relay only a small portion of the outrage.

That outrage built from Monday forward, and not just because of Kerry's arrogance and bluster.

Even as the men and women in uniform heard the sneer and felt the slur, they also watched as elite media dismissed their anger and participated in the diminishment of their right to be incensed.

On Tuesday Halperin told me that the military are "not necessarily the best arbiters of Senator Kerry’s sense of humor."

On Wednesday morning --oblivious to the feelings of the troops and their families-- the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz intoned that "[t]here isn't anybody, including in the Bush administration, who believes that Kerry meant to insult the soldiers in Iraq with his clumsy joke.

On Wednesday afternoon --even after Kerry had published a half-apology (and an unsatisfactory one to much of the military if my e-mail is good indication), MSNBC's Chris Matthew was demanding of former Kerry campaign manager Bob Shrum why Kerry had apologized to people whom he had not insulted.

Continued...