The Washington Post takes apart Bush’s debate performance, catching him in several lies. Here’s the heart of the article:

As in the previous debate and in his stump speech, Bush repeated a number of assertions about Kerry’s voting record on taxes, intelligence spending and budgets that are out of context and misleading.

Bush, hitting Kerry for alleged inconsistency, also asserted: “He said he thought Saddam Hussein was a grave threat, and now he said it was a mistake to remove Saddam Hussein from power.”

Kerry has never said that. This attack is derived from a Kerry statement that “the satisfaction that we take in [Hussein’s] downfall does not hide this fact: We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure.” Kerry prefaced that statement, however, by saying that although Hussein was “a brutal dictator who deserved his own special place in hell,” that by itself was not a reason to go to war.

In last night’s debate, Bush also asserted often that Kerry was rated the “most liberal” senator, citing a study by the magazine National Journal. This is correct for the past year — Kerry earned the rating in part because he missed a number of votes while campaigning — but in a recent issue, National Journal said “the shorthand used to describe our ratings of Kerry and Edwards is sometimes misleading — or just plain wrong.”

Bush said Kerry’s tax-cut rollback would raise taxes on 900,000 small businesses. This is misleading. Under Bush’s definition, a small business is any taxpayer who reports some income from investments, partnerships or trusts. By that definition, every partner at a huge accounting firm or at the largest law firm would represent a small business.

Although Bush expressed surprise at Kerry’s assertion that the president earned $84 from his investment in a timber company and, thus, qualified as a small business — “I own a timber company? That’s news to me. Need some wood?” — the Web site www.factcheck.org backed up Kerry’s assertion.

The same article catches Kerry in a few mistatements, but no outright distortions of Bush’s record. Still, the namby-pamby editors felt the need to balance the headline — “Plenty of flaws among the facts; Candidates made questionable claims” — and the authors wrote a dumb lede: “WASHINGTON - President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry disagreed vigorously last night as they tossed out plenty of numbers, and both demonstrated a talent for relying on facts and assertions of questionable origin.”