For the second straight day, the Rasmussen poll shows President Bush with 49% of the vote and John Kerry with 45%: Presidential Tracking Poll.

Hugh Hewitt describes John Kerry’s speech last night following President Bush as “off-key, bitter, and self-destructive,” and that’s about right.

The New York Times features a blatant lie from Kerry right at the start of their article on his speech: Bush Is ‘Unfit’ to Lead U.S., Kerry Charges.

“For the past week, they have attacked my patriotism and even my fitness to serve as commander in chief,” Mr. Kerry told thousands here at a midnight rally shortly after Mr. Bush accepted the Republican nomination for a second term and questioned Mr. Kerry’s support for combat troops in Iraq.

“Well, here is my answer to them,” Mr. Kerry said to cheers. “I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could’ve and who misled America into Iraq.”

The Kerry campaign scheduled the event days ago in an effort to reclaim the initiative in the race without letting a single news cycle pass. Mr. Kerry spoke a mere half-hour after the president had ended his acceptance speech, and Kerry aides issued his prepared text even before Mr. Bush spoke.

To the (rare) credit of the New York Times, they immediately point out that neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney said a word about Kerry’s “patriotism.” Cheney even explicitly honored Kerry for his service and the audience applauded. Bush and Cheney’s criticisms were overwhelmingly based on real substantive points. Kerry’s outrage at the “questioning of his patriotism” is as staged and phony as the rest of him.

Mr. Cheney capped a weeklong assault on Mr. Kerry’s character and national-security credentials at the Republican convention on Wednesday, saying that he honored Mr. Kerry’s service in Vietnam but that the senator’s 20-year voting record on foreign policy and military issues made him unfit to be president.

Mr. Bush, for his part, depicted Mr. Kerry on Thursday as a tax-raising big-spending social liberal who had defended his vote against an Iraq appropriations bill by saying the question was complicated.

Character, national security voting record, taxes. According to Flipper, issues like these should be off-limits.

And after whining so bitterly about nonexistent attacks on his service record and his patriotism, Kerry proceeded to trash both Bush and Cheney for their service records, invoked the dark name of Halliburton to appeal to the Michael Moore moonbats, and entered my personal history as the wretched purveyor of one of the most pathetic, most lethargically vicious political speeches I’ve ever witnessed.