Following Senator John Kerry's response to attacks at the Republican National Convention, FOX News Channel reporters and commentators on the September 3 edition of Special Report with Brit Hume rushed to the defense of President George W. Bush and his supporters, accusing Kerry of inventing attacks on his patriotism and fitness to serve as commander in chief that did not occur. In fact, Kerry's remarks were accurate: In their convention speeches, Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) launched thinly veiled attacks on Kerry's patriotism and his fitness to serve.

After showing a clip of Kerry telling a crowd, “Vice President Cheney suggested that I was unfit for office and unfit to be commander in chief,” FOX News Channel chief political correspondent Carl Cameron attempted to correct Kerry. “Cheney never called Kerry unfit for command,” Cameron said.

While it is true that Cheney never actually uttered the word “unfit,” his convention address carried that judgment. Referring to Kerry's vote against the $87 billion supplemental appropriations bill for military operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cheney said, “Senator Kerry is campaigning for the position of commander in chief. Yet he does not seem to understand the first obligation of a commander in chief, and that is to support American troops in combat.” (MMFA has documented this distortion of Kerry's vote against the $87 billion appropriations bill.)

Next, Cameron played a clip in which Kerry stated, "[T]hey attacked my patriotism." Then, apparently assuming that Kerry was referring to Bush -- though Kerry had said nothing to justify that assumption -- Cameron refuted Kerry's claim by reporting only Bush's recent remarks on Kerry's service, while ignoring harsh attacks by surrogates like Miller: "[R]ather than attack Kerry's patriotism, the president has, in fact, called Kerry's Vietnam combat service more valorous than his own stateside service in the Texas Air National Guard."

Later on the same show, U.S. News & World Report senior writer and FOX News Channel political contributor Michael Barone criticized Kerry for responding to attacks on his patriotism that Barone said had never occurred: "[H]is patriotism had not been attacked. Zell Miller specifically said that he did not doubt that John Kerry's patriotism [sic] ... they were honoring his patriotism." At the end of the show, Roll Call executive editor and FOX News Channel contributor Morton M. Kondracke echoed Barone's criticism: “His [Kerry's] response to this soaring speech ... was a petty, small response talking about Dick Cheney's draft deferments and how his patriotism had questioned, which -- his patriotism had not been questioned. You know, Zell Miller delivered some low blows, but they weren't questioning his [Kerry's] patriotism.”

Miller never declared outright, “John Kerry is unpatriotic,” but he certainly conveyed that message. He compared “today's Democratic leaders” unfavorably with Wendell Lewis Willkie, former President Franklin Roosevelt's Republican challenger in 1940. Willkie “made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue,” Miller said. By contrast, Miller lamented, “Today, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.” Moments later Miller was even more explicit: “Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator.”