The special Friday edition from the Democratic National Convention included screen time for Markos (of Daily Kos) and Jesse Taylor of Pandagon. Most excellent!

By the way, don't miss the Web-only videos from the convention, including three from Lewis Black!

AP - Campaigning again after sidelining himself during the Democratic National Convention, President Bush charged Friday that John Kerry lacked any "signature achievements" in his nearly 20-year Senate career.

Of course, as is typical of today's journalism, there's absolutely no attempt to compare what Kerry did in the past twenty years vs. what Bush did in the past twenty years. Nor does it explore the obvious comparison: what about the time before the past twenty years?

Before he was 40, John Kerry graduated Yale and volunteered for service in Vietnam. After earning all those medals, he returned to the US, testified before Congress about the War, and founded Vietnam Veterans for America. He was then accepted to Boston College Law School, graduated, and became a prosecutor in Boston. He ran for the US House of Representatives once and lost, but in 1982, he ran for Lt. Governor of Massachusetts and won. In 1984, at age 40, he was elected to the US Senate, where he's served for 20 years.

Before he was 40, George W. Bush was accepted as a "legacy" student at Yale University, where he blew off classes and graduated with a GPA variously described as 1.68 or 2.0. His family's friends pulled connections to get him into the Texas Air National Guard, and to get him accepted for flight training despite the lowest acceptable score on the test. In both cases, he magically jumped ahead of hundreds of other people on waiting lists for those positions through absolutely no merit or achievement of his own.

He expressly stated a wish not to serve overseas, though a later attempt to volunteer for a 3-month overseas tour was denied due to his lack of experience. With two years remaining on his enlistment, Bush refused to take a required physical (shortly after random drug testing began) and never flew again for the TANG, despite saying in his "autobiography" that he did. (Recently released records strongly suggest that Bush fraudulently collected pay and credit for months in which he did not serve.)

Upon discharge from the TANG, Bush worked on a failed Senate campaign in Alabama, and then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, despite a complete lack of academic credentials that would get him admitted. He then, by his own admission, bummed around mostly drunk, participating in senior management of one failed company after another, until finally sobering up at the age of 40. (He then continued to preside over more failed companies, bailed out each time by family friends, until winning election as Governor of Texas during the big Republican sweep of 1994.)

Bush has no signature achievements for the last 20 years, either, and none for the time before 1984 either. Kerry has both. Kerry spent 19 of the past 20 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and is extensively familiar with international policies and world politics. Bush had never even been to Canada before his election as President.

Kerry was instrumental in uncovering the Iran-Contra scandal in the Senate. Bush supported his father, who as President, pardoned those involved in the illegal arms sales before they could come to trial and reveal embarrassing details.

Kerry was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, the one he keeps mentioning he worked with John McCain on, to find out about missing and captured US soldiers in Vietnam. Bush has still never been to Vietnam.

Kerry is the ranking Democrat on the Senate East Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee, and is an expert on North Korea. Bush is now negotiating with North Korea not to make any more nuclear warheads, after pushing the country to do exactly that by cutting off all aid and calling them "evil" for two years.

Kerry was ranking Democrat on the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations from 1987 to 1997. He wrote a book about international crime: The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens America's Security. Bush had staffer Karen Hughes write a fact-challenged autobiography in his name, A Charge to Keep, and apparently has not yet read the whole thing.

People wonder why the left calls George W. Bush dumb. One reason? He keeps inviting comparisons like these that show exactly how unqualified he is for the office he holds and seeks. It's not the pot calling the kettle black; it's the pot calling the sky black.

Update: At just about the same time I posted this, Josh Marshall took on the ironies with a bit more panache.