Daily Howler: No one but the New York Times shows such woeful bad judgment. Also: Bush-Kerry II!

It’s embarrassing to see a president stoop to the type of deception displayed Friday evening. In the first half of the Great Debate, Bush was faring rather poorly. And so, in answer to Question 9 (of 18), he turned to a potent, discredited claim. “Let me see where to start,”� he mused. And then he had it! He knew where to start! He started with a fake old deception:

BUSH (10/8/04): Let me see where to start here. First, the National Journal named Senator Kennedy [sic] the most liberal senator — of all! And that’s saying something with that bunch. You might say that took a lot of hard work.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ! Except Kerry isn’t “the most liberal senator” and the National Journal hasn’t said otherwise. Indeed, how misleading was the president’s claim? When Bush began making this claim back in March, the Journal quickly published an article noting that the claim was vastly misleading. Indeed, Kerry’s lifetime voting record doesn’t place him among the Journal’s ten most liberal senators, as the mag pointed out (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/6/04). But so what? Facing disaster on Question 9, Bush went ahead and pimped the charge anyway.