Kerry mocks rough and ready Bush.

“Do we want leadership as it’s called that can’t face reality and admit mistakes or do we want leadership that sees the truth and tells the truth to the American people?” Kerry asked, shouting in a hoarse voice in a performance a world removed from the prosecutorial style he adopted in the debate.

“For me, the most stunning moment of the whole evening was when George Bush was asked to name three mistakes that he has made … and the President couldn’t even name one mistake.”

This “name three mistakes” nonsense makes me want to scream. If President Bush had played along and named some “mistakes,” Kerry would be attacking him for it today, using Bush’s admissions as ammunition. But since he didn’t admit “mistakes,” Kerry attacks him for that instead.

It’s the classic “Have you stopped beating your wife?” ploy.

UPDATE at 10/9/04 1:07:09 pm:

For the record, here is President Bush’s response to this silly, loaded question:

Q. President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision and what you did to correct it. Thank you.

President Bush: I - I have made a lot of decisions and some of them little, like appointments to boards you’ve never heard of, and some of them big. And in a war there’s a lot of - there’s a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say, he shouldn’t have done that, he shouldn’t have made that decision. And I’ll take responsibility for them. I’m human.

But on the big questions, about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq - I’ll stand by those decisions because I think they’re right. It’s really what your - when they ask about the mistakes, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re trying to say, did you make a mistake going into Iraq? And the answer is absolutely not. It was the right decision.

The Duelfer report confirmed that decision today because what Saddam Hussein was doing was trying to get rid of sanctions so he could reconstitute a weapons program and the biggest threat facing America is terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. We knew he hated us. We knew he’d been - invaded other countries. We knew he tortured his own people.

On the tax cut, it’s a big decision. I did the right decision. Our recession was one of the shallowest in modern history.

Now you ask what mistakes. I’ve made some mistakes in appointing people, but I’m not going to name them. I don’t want to hurt their feelings on national TV.

But history will look back and I’m fully prepared to accept any mistakes that history judges to my administration. Because the president makes the decisions, the president has to take the responsibility.