Presidential Debate 3

1. The Tora Bora Slander (powerlineblog)
2. Tora Bora Bull (rich lowry, nationalreview)
3. Tora Bora Baloney: As John Kerry tells it, Tora Bora is the place where President Bush let Osama bin Laden get away. In the candidate's oft-repeated formulation, the al Qaeda leader was "surrounded" and escaped only because the president "outsourced" the job of capturing him to Afghan warlords.
   Well, that's not the way the battle's commanders remember it. The Afghanistan war was led by Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Michael "Rifle" DeLong. As it happens, both men, now retired, have books out that tell a different story. Nor are the ex-soldier and ex-Marine bashful about speaking out to correct the former Navy lieutenant. To them, Mr. Kerry's version of the battle of Tora Bora is revisionist history. (melanie kirkpatrick, wsj)
4. Lynne Cheney upset with Kerry over remark: "Now, you know, I did have a chance to assess John Kerry once more and now the only thing I could conclude: This is not a good man," she said. "Of course, I am speaking as a mom, and a pretty indignant mom. This is not a good man. What a cheap and tawdry political trick." (news.yahoo.com)
5. Kerry's remark on Cheney's daughter: Recall the way Dick Cheney handled when John Edwards brought this up during their debate. Cheney "thanked" Edwards for his words about the Cheney family and didn't use the remainder of his 30 seconds. This was perfect. To those who didn't realize what Edwards was trying to accomplish, Cheney sounded gracious. To those who did realize it, he sounded withering. (powerlineblog)
6. Mention of Gay Daughter a Cheap Trick, Lynne Cheney Says (washingtonpost)
7. Edward's wife says Lynne Cheney ashamed (nationalreview)
8. Shameful, indeed: Suppose that there was a question asked about health coverage for mental health issues and Bush brought up Kerry’s first wife who suffered from depression.
   And then Bush went out and claimed that he was only being supportive and therefore Kerry must feel shame about his wife’s mental health. Wonder how Democrats would be responding to that? (polipundit)
9. Gasps in the Press Room: There were no laughs but gasps in the press room when Kerry noted that Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, Mary, was a lesbian. It came during a discussion of gay marriage. Now, of course, everyone knows something about Mary — she is open about her sexual orientation and has worked in outreach programs to gays and lesbians, and even brought her partner to the vice presidential debate in Cleveland.
   The GOP wasted no time complaining, with Lynne Cheney calling it a “cheap and tawdry political trick.”
   “Now I have had a chance to assess John Kerry once more,” she said, “and the only thing I could conclude is that this is not a good man." An overreaction, perhaps, but Kerry did come off in that exchange as politically manipulative and cold, very cold — a glimpse into at least one part of his personality that he is better off not showing on television.(howard fineman, msnbc.msn.com)
10. Gay vs. Too Straight!Tie goes to Bush. (kausfiles)
11. After the Final Debate, Some Voters Are Still Sitting on the Fence (nytimes)
12. “This Guy Thinks We’re All Idiots”Dubya gets Kerry. Americans gotta love that. (jonah goldberg, nationalreview)
13. DNC Manual: claim voter intimidation even if none exists (drudgereport)
14. Mystery Surrounds Kerry's Navy Discharge (ny sun)
15. A 55-point chasm in military support for Kerry and Bush (ross mackenzie, townhall)

Other

• Iwo Jima, if covered by media today (Zell Miller, washingtontimes)
• The ABC's of media bias - Mark Halperin: Mark Halperin’s idea of what is right may be what is Left. He was born in 1965 in Bethesda, Maryland, the red-diaper baby of hard-Left-connected controversial foreign policy specialist Morton Halperin. This fact reveals an entire Left-spin universe in which Mark grew up exposed to his father’s comrades and radical ideas.
  Morton Halperin today is Senior Vice President of the left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP) and Director of the Open Society Policy Center established by eccentric billionaire international financier George Soros.
  If ABC News discovered that the public watchdog over a corporation was the son of one high official in that corporation and the brother of another, ABC rightly would report this as a scandalous conflict of interest and a betrayal of public trust. ABC never notified its audience that its reporter Mark Halperin was covering a Clinton White House that employed two members of his immediate family. (frontpagemag)
• THOMAS SOWELL on the perverse logic of leftist do-goodery -- (social tragedies without personal consequenc, townhall)
• ECONOMISTS AGAINST JOHN KERRY. The signers include Nobel winners Edward Prescott, Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, Gary Becker, James Buchanan, and Robert Mundell.
• 368 Economists Against Kerrynomics (nationalreview)
• Hypocritical Europeans (antimedia.blogspot)
• Archbishop disputes NYT reporting (rockymountainnews)
• Duelfer to France: J'accuse (safire, nyt)