This is from the President's Radio Address, today:

And to make sure America is the best place in the world to do business and create jobs, we will cut regulations, end junk lawsuits, pass a sound energy policy and make tax relief permanent. Senator Kerry takes a very different approach to our economy. He was named the most liberal member of the United States Senate, and that's a title he has earned. Over the past 20 years, Senator Kerry has voted to raise taxes 98 times. He opposed all our tax relief, and voted instead to squeeze an extra $2,000 in taxes from the average middle class family. Now he's running on an agenda of higher taxes and higher spending and more government control over American life. My opponent wants to empower government. I want to use government to empower people.

Since September the 11th, 2001, I have led a global campaign to protect the American people and bring our enemies to account. We have tripled spending on homeland security and passed the Patriot Act to help law enforcement and intelligence stop terrorists inside the United States. We removed terror regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now both nations are on the path to democracy. We shut down a black-market supplier of deadly weapons technology, and convinced Libya to give up its weapons of mass destruction programs. And more than three-quarters of al Qaeda's key members and associates have been detained or killed.

In the middle of a war, Senator Kerry is proposing policies and doctrines that would weaken America and make the world more dangerous. He's proposed the Kerry doctrine, which would paralyze America by subjecting our national security decisions to a global test. He supports the International Criminal Court, where unaccountable foreign prosecutors could put American troops on trial in front of foreign judges. And after voting to send our troops into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, he voted against the body armor and bullets they need to win.

For all of Senator Kerry's shifting positions on Iraq, one thing is clear: If my opponent had his way, Saddam Hussein would be sitting in a palace today, not a prison, and Iraq would still be a danger to America. As chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer testified this week, "Most senior members of the Saddam Hussein regime and scientists assumed that the programs would begin in earnest when sanctions ended, and sanctions were eroding." Instead, because our coalition acted, Iraq is free, America is safer, and the world will be more peaceful for our children and our grandchildren.

I will keep this nation on the offensive against terrorists, with the goal of total victory. I will keep our economy moving, so every worker has a good job, quality health care and a secure retirement.

Let's put the content, which is junk, aside. People, this is a campaign speech. Your tax dollars pay to make this speech available on the White House web site. I don't know how many radio stations carry it, but I'm sure a great many do, and as a public service. And what about Armed Forces Radio?

This stinks. And there are three more Saturdays before the election.

What stinks even more is Sinclair Broadcasting's latest hijink. Sinclair has ordered its stations to pre-empt regular programming -- prime time -- in order to run a film slamming Kerry's activism during the Vietnam War. Jay Rosenof PressThink and BOPNews (and professor of journalism at NYU) believes that Sinclair should be able to skirt around what's left of the fairness doctrine fairly easily.

The film, by a former "reporter" who recently was employed by the Bush Administration in their Homeland Security media operation, is essentially a 90-minute "swift boat" ad.

According to the Sinclair Broadcasting Group's web site, their stations reach approximately 24 percent of U.S. television households.

This past week, the Bush campaign hoodwinked CNN and MSNBC by announcing the President would deliver a "major policy address" -- which turned out to be his usually Kerry-bashing stump speech. No new policy. But CNN and MSNBC broadcast the entire speech -- a free, hourlong campaign ad for Bush.

Yet hope remains. Via Kevin Drum -- ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin wrote in a memo to his staff:

The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson and Howard Fineman on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done.

Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.

We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that.

He to whom I will not link, Drudge, is spinning this as a scandal. It's been clear for a long time that the Right doesn't care about truth. Or, rather, they don't understand there is any truth outside of ideology. Glenn Reynolds apparently hasn't heard this one yet because I didn't see anything about it on his web site. This should give him fits.  

First, momentum seems clearly to be on Kerry's side. The president needed to arrest that momentum and I don't think he did.

The other reason turns on something I said last week. The basis of President Bush's resurgence in late August and September was based less on confidence in him than in his campaign's effective effort to portray Kerry as not an acceptable commander-in-chief. Kerry's strong performance in the first debate undermined that impression and knocked the race back to parity. I don't think anything happened in this debate to change that.

In this uneven fight, second-debate Bush defeated first-debate Bush. This, of course, is the way Bush and his handlers want the media to spin this debate—"Bush improved, therefore Bush won" —since, after all, it was a fight the President was bound to win. All he had to do was avoid kicking over his stool, shouting "No fair!" and storming off stage. ... Bush defeating himself, though, is not the same as Bush defeating Senator John Kerry. The second debate—a "town hall," with questions offered by undecided voters in St. Louis, Mo.—was a format that was supposed to play more to Bush's strengths in connecting to people. The fact that the candidates were not tethered to the podium eliminated the President's problem, from debate one, of hunching at the podium while he spoke; he had an audience to smile and wink at; and simply being able to move around the stage made him appear less physically besieged. ...

But although Bush's face conveyed a studied unflappability, it sometimes seemed that his voice didn't get the memo. Especially in the first half, on foreign policy, he practically bellowed his answers; when Kerry ended a critique of the Iraq war by saying that, if Bush had chosen differently, "Osama bin Laden might be in jail or dead," Bush's head popped up, and he seemed like he was about to ask his taller challenger to take this outside. At one point, moderator Charles Gibson tried to ask a follow-up when Bush wanted to rebut Kerry, and Bush simply steamrollered over him, barking his answer until poor Charlie gave up. Earlier, Gibson had promised to hold the candidates to the rules "forcefully but politely." You're one for two, Charlie.

• Kerry's got the Big Mo; this week's polls show him gaining.
• Events -- Iraq, jobs, oil prices -- are breaking against Bush.
• The Dems have prevailed in the spin war after the two previous debates.

I think a strong win tonight could make Kerry unstoppable.

Contraindications: Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog sees signs the press wants to write a "Bush Bounces Back" story. If Bush is able to speak English sentences they'll say he's reversed the bad mojo of the last debate.

Surely, Bush has seen videos of his performance and realizes the facial grimmaces weren't working for him, and he won't make that mistake again. On the other hand, this is Bush we're talking about -- the man who doesn't make mistakes. 

From Liberal Oasis:

Even if he does put on a different face, it is still questionable if he will put on the right one.

If Wednesday's speech -- hyped as "major" by the Bushies -- is a preview of tonight's performance, the answer will be no.

As LO argued last week, Kerry's debate victory showed that the 2004 electorate is interested in substance, details, and most importantly, solutions.

Bush's speech was substance-free, nothing but a string of sarcastic attacks.

(Amazingly preceded by Bush's claim that he's "looking forward to coming down the stretch with a positive, strong message.")

Apparently, according to the NY Times, Bush's advisers think the mistake of the first debate was that he didn't hammer Kerry hard enough on flip-flops.

OK. Let 'em think that.

We'll find out tonight if Bush is capable of anything but cheap insults of Kerry. I believe that if he doesn't offer up more substance tonight than he did last time, he's toast.

And my reading of the I Ching says Kerry's gonna kick ass.

I'm going to join the group liveblogging on Open Source Politics and, if I can keyboard fast enough, may put some comments up here as well. But feel free to add your thoughts, worries, predictions, recipes, whatever, to the comments below.

See also: Bob Sommerby suspects NBC's coverage of the veep debate was fixed. That would explain a lot.

  

The Education Department this summer destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history after the office of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife complained that it mentioned the National Standards for History, which she has long opposed. [Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Jean Merl, "Booklet that Upset Mrs. Cheney Is History," The Los Angeles Times, October 8, 2004]

I had to read this story twice to wrap my head around it. You'll remember that every time Hillary Clinton so much as hiccupped while her husband was president, the wingnuts would scream about power hunger and the "co-presidency." Yet the wife of a vice president can order 300,000 books burned, and hardly anyone notices.*

According to the LA Times, the 73-page booklet was a new edition of a 10-year-old how-to guide called "Helping Your Child Learn History." The booklet, published by the Department of Education, offered such controversial advice as taking children to museums and visiting historical sites.

Apparently Mrs. Cheney's only objection to the booklet was that it mentioned the National Standards for History, about which Mrs. Cheney has had a bug up her rectum for many years. Thus, 300,000 copies of a booklet already paid for by our tax dollars were trashed. A new version will be written and printed. Another drop in the Ocean of Deficit.**

So what are the National Standards for History? And why do they upset Lynne Cheney so?

Originally released in 1994, the National Standards for History were written by teachers, administrators, scholars and parents, with help from organizations such as the American Association of School Librarians. Development of the standards was administered by the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles under the guidance of the National Council for History Standards. Funding was provided b the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education during the Bush I administration.

By some coincidence, Lynne Cheney was chairperson of the National Endowment of the Humanities during most of this time, from 1986 to 1993. Whatever role she played in the creation of the standards, if any, is not clear.

One week before the original standards were released, Cheney (who had resigned from the NEH by then) wrote a blistering op ed for the Wall Street Journal ("The End of History," October 20, 1994) accusing the standards of extremist revisionism.

Jon Weiner wrote in The New Republic:

Cheney said the issue was simple: not enough white men. Harriet Tubman, the African American who led slaves to freedom before the Civil War, was "mentioned six times," while George Washington "makes only a fleeting appearance," and Thomas Edison gets ignored altogether.

A few days after Cheney's article appeared, Rush Limbaugh had it on the air. Limbaugh yelled that the standards were the work of a secret group and should be "flushed down the toilet."

Thereafter, more respectable journalists began picking up the story. The New York Times ran an Associated Press article on October 26, the day the standards were officially released. (Headline: "plan to teach u.s. history is said to slight white males.") The story did not describe the standards or give examples. Instead, it reported on Cheney's laments: "They make it sound as if everything in America is wrong and grim." [History lesson. (Lynne V. Cheney's baseless attacks on the National Standards for History), The New Republic, 1/2/1995]

And, of course, the usual Echo Chamber crew -- e.g., Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Times, etc., along with the aforementioned Wall Street Journal and Limbaugh -- took up Cheney's claims and repeated them through every possible medium. The public became well conditioned to believe the standards were were "developed in the councils of the Bolshevik and Nazi Parties, and successfully deployed on the youth of the Third Reich and the Soviet Empire" [Wall Street Journal, "The History Thieves," November 8, 1995].

For a spine-chilling archive of what "journalists" did to the standards, including Ms. Cheney's above-mentioned Wall Street Journal op ed, click here.

Naturally, Cheney's accusations were all lies. Jon Weiner got hold of the original standards and read them, and reported that white men were represented on every page.

Flip to page 76: for the revolution of 1776, "Analyze the character and roles of the military, political and diplomatic leaders who helped forge the American victory." If you don't discuss George Washington, you flunk. Page 138: for the period 1870-1900, "How did inventions change the way people lived and worked? Who were the great inventors of the period?" If you don't discuss Edison, you're in trouble.

What about Cheney's claim that "not a single one of the thirty-one standards mentions the Constitution"? Well, page 84 says students should be able to "analyze the fundamental ideas behind the distribution of powers and the system of checks and balances established by the Constitution." And, it turns out that the person mentioned most often is not Tubman, but Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan comes in second.

So what's Cheney's problem with the standards? Here's a clue from an educational journal:

Cheney charged that the standards were a loaded document whose "authors save their unqualified admiration for people, places, and events that are politically correct," and that the standards offered heavy doses of multiculturalism and obsession with such things as McCarthyism (19 references), racism (the Ku Klux Klan is mentioned 17 times), and mistreatment of indigenous peoples but give little attention to some of the core developments and figures of American history. [ National Standards for United States History: the storm of controversy continues. ]

Ooo, the evil of multiculturalism. We can't let children learn that not everything important in history was carried out by a white male elite (with an occasional assist from white females), can we?

But there's more to Cheney than old-fashioned racism. Jonathan Chait wrote in The American Prospect:

Scratch slightly below the surface of her polemics and you find the basic work of political coalition building. Her stories of innocents betrayed by the academic establishment usually reflect the fears of the Christian right. She takes this raw material, applies a sheen of respectable intellectual neoconservatism, and connects it to a larger ideological and legislative purpose. So we have the predicaments of Stacy and Joey and poor Mrs. McDaniel, followed by Cheney somberly pointing the finger at the usual liberal villains. [Jonathan Chait, "Lynne Cheney, Policy Assassin," The American Prospect vol. 10 no. 43, March 1, 1999 - April 1, 1999]

The authors of the National Standards for History said they were created to move students past passive absorption of dates and facts and toward the analysis of historical issues, i.e., critical thinking. (Thinking does make the righties nervous, doesn't it?) They were never meant to be a mandated curriculum. Instead, the scholars hoped (and still hope, I assume) that textbook publishers and school boards would voluntarily apply the standards as a guideline toward developing curriculum.  

It is probably the case that the wingnuts could not understand that the standards were not the exhaustive list of everything kids should be taught about history. They'd skim through it counting the number of times George Washington's name came up, without noticing that a suggestion to discuss the leaders of the Revolution would necessarily include Washington.

Whatever. Lynne Cheney doesn't want you to know about the standards. Hence, the burning of 300,000 books that merely mentioned them.

___________

While researching this article, I stumbled on this revealing factoid: In 1995, Mrs. Cheney and Senator Joe Lieberman co-founded the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).  These days, ACTA is busily squashing campus dissent for the "war on terra." Aren't you glad we didn't nominate Joe?

Also, I stumbled across this article from 1997 about how House Republicans nixied a bill that would have applied national testing standards on American public schools. Isn't that what No Child Left Behind was about? And is that a flipflop?

ENDNOTES

*Note to righties: I mean "burning" figuratively, not literally; if in fact the booklets were shredded it's beside the point.*** Also, although Mrs. Cheney says she did not order the booklets destroyed, according to the LA Times they were destroyed only because she wanted them destroyed.

** The new version, on the Department of Education web site, includes a plug for the President in the Foreword:

Through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, President George W. Bush has made clear his commitment to the goals of raising standards of achievement for all children and of providing all children with highly qualified teachers and with instruction that is based on scientific research. Helping Your Child Learn History is part of the president's efforts to provide families with the latest research and practical information that can help them to support their children's learning at home.

***Righties tend to be rigidly linear thinkers, and you have to explain everything to them very carefully.

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If this sort of thing were happening to Democrats, both the Michael Moore-types and the mainstream media would be screaming about Republican stormtroopers directed by Reichsführer-SS John Ashcroft. Since it's happening to Republicans, however, it is mostly covered just by local media. In any event, it cerainly gives one pause about putting up a Bush yard sign or putting on a Bush bumpersticker.

Vandals set fire to signs and wrote pro-George W. Bush messages on the front of the Democratic Party Headquarters of Lafayette, Louisiana. A mixture of ash from the fire and what appeared to be motor oil was used to smear "4+ GWB" across the front windows and "W" on the headquarters' door. This is the second time the office was hit by vandals.

In Pennsylvania, a man ran out of a Republican office building and attacked Kerry demonstrators across the street.

A little after noon, a man who looked to be in his 50s ran out the front door of the Republican office building, crossed the four-lane Main Street, and grabbed Lainie Maloy's big blue Kerry banner.

"He was screaming like a lunatic, obscenities mostly," said the Greensburg woman, who sported peace-sign earrings.

"He told us he hopes al-Qaida kills us all," said Thor Strong. "He grabbed the banner and took off back across the road, dragging [Maloy] with him."

"He pulled me right out into the traffic," Maloy said. "Then he finally let go and ran away, back into the Republican building over there."

Workers in the Republican office denied knowing who the man was.

Democratic headquarters in Lawrence, Kansas, vandalized -- somebody spray-painted "Bush" and some profanities (I assume the profanities were not modifying "Bush") on windows and signs.

In Oregon, Kerry-Edwards signs were stolen or damaged. Some cars with Kerry bumper stickers were vandalized.  

In Galveston County, Texas, vandals broke a window of the Dem campaign office and left behind a tire iron and a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker. (The county Republican chairman denied that Bush supporters could have done such a thing.)

As O'Neill autographed books for admirers, veteran Bobby Muller approached in his wheelchair, shook the author's hand, then asked repeatedly if O'Neill would debate him on Kerry's record.

After the two bickered for a few moments, O'Neill's wife, Anne, intervened, telling Muller to stop while nudging him away in his wheelchair.

"Tell her about the wreath you laid on Ho Chi Minh's grave," O'Neill said derisively, apparently in reference to a 1981 trip Muller made to Vietnam as a representative of the Vietnam Veterans of America, a group he formed in 1978 with Kerry.

A representative for Muller said the 1981 trip was part of an effort to get information on POWs and MIAs, and that Vietnamese soldiers, not Muller, laid the wreath at the gravesite.

O'Neill is pathological. Is he capable of telling the truth? Is smearing all he can do?

O'Neill continues to bravely defend himself from a guy in a wheelchair:

"Come on, open it up, John," Muller told O'Neill. "Stop ducking me. Let's go head to head. Let's debate."

Organizers called in security and threatened to throw Muller out, but he was allowed to stay for the luncheon. Several times during O'Neill's speech, Kerry supporters in the audience jeered or shouted "that's not true" as O'Neill laid out the basis of his book.

Later when former Swift Boat captain and Kerry supporter Skip Barker asked a question, O'Neill dismissed him and others as Democratic Party plants.

In fact, the pro-Kerry vets were from a group called Truth and Trust.

Members of truthandtrust.com said they organized to challenge O'Neill's claims that Kerry did not deserve his three Purple Hearts or military awards. Several members of the group, including Rich McCann, served with Kerry in Vietnam.

"It's time for us to bury Vietnam," McCann, of Cleveland, said before the City Club event. "It's time for us to move on to other issues." ...

Jim Wasser of Kankakee, who served with Kerry, said he joined the new group in part because he felt O'Neill and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were unfairly damaging the reputations of the men who served with Kerry.

"When you're lying, you're lying," Wasser said before the luncheon. "That's why we're drawing a line in the sand today."

So, per John O'Neill, people who defend the truth are "Democratic Party plants." OK. Anyway, the Truth and Trust guys have some good stuff on their web site. It's well worth a visit.

Purely on the basis of this evening's debate, Cheney has a mammoth credibility problem. Again and again he said things that were simply false. In the case of the Iraq-9/11 tie, I think there's no question but that he simply lied when he claimed there was never a connection.

Yet Cheney is well-liked within the Washington establishment so it will be interesting to see whether the the big TV shows and major dailies are willing to call him on it.

It will be key for the Democrats to force the matter and tie it to the broader issue of the president's lack of credibility and fear of levelling with the American people.

Amy Sullivan writes at Political Animal that the MSNBC pundit crew was on drugs. Atrios says they were smokin' crack. However, James Wolcott says it was just junk food:

Matthews, hopped up on Cheetos and Nehi orange, crowned Cheney the victor in the debate and within ten seconds of his fight-night wrapup was tossing out conspiracy theories as to why the liberal press would be too chicken to acknowledge that Cheney had crushed his opponent. The MSNBC panelists were as giddy as Matthews, Joe Scarborough claiming Edwards had been obliterated, Andrea Mitchell all aglow at this demonstration of raw authority, and so many references to "the stature gap" that it was as if they were trying out a new catchphrase. But Matthews' record on catchphrases isn't the most stellar. After the Kerry Bush debate, he excitedly said that "mixed messages" would be the "fuzzy math" of this campaign, a bullseye painted on Kerry's back. Only Matthews could get that worked up about something that mundane. 

Early in the debate, Cheney snapped at Edwards, "The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11." But in numerous interviews, Cheney has skated close to the line in ways that may have certainly left that impression on viewers, usually when he cited the possibility that Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001, met with an Iraqi official — even after that theory was largely discredited.

CHENEY: Gwen, the story that appeared today about this report is one I asked for. I ask an awful lot of questions as part of my job as vice president. A CIA spokesman was quoted in that story as saying they had not yet reached the bottom line and there is still debate over this question of the relationship between Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein.

The report also points out that at one point some of Zarqawi‘s people were arrested.  Saddam personally intervened to have them released, supposedly at the request of Zarqawi

But let‘s look at what we know about Mr. Zarqawi.

We know he was running a terrorist camp, training terrorists in Afghanistan prior to 9/11.  We know that when we went into Afghanistan that he then migrated to Baghdad.  He set up shop in Baghdad, where he oversaw the poisons facility up at Kermal (ph), where the terrorists were developing ricin and other deadly substances to use.

We know he‘s still in Baghdad today.  He is responsible for most of the major car bombings that have killed or maimed thousands of people.  He‘s the one you will see on the evening news beheading hostages. 

He is, without question, a bad guy.  He is, without question, a terrorist.  He was, in fact, in Baghdad before the war, and he‘s in Baghdad now after the war.

The fact of the matter is that this is exactly the kind of track record we‘ve seen over the years.  We have to deal with Zarqawi by taking him out, and that‘s exactly what we‘ll do.

Apparently, Bush had three opportunities, long before the war, to destroy a terrorist camp in northern Iraq run by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaida associate who recently cut off the head of Nicholas Berg. But the White House decided not to carry out the attack because, as the story puts it:

[T]he administration feared [that] destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

The implications of this are more shocking, in their way, than the news from Abu Ghraib. Bush promoted the invasion of Iraq as a vital battle in the war on terrorism, a continuation of our response to 9/11. Here was a chance to wipe out a high-ranking terrorist. And Bush didn't take advantage of it because doing so might also wipe out a rationale for invasion.