Tim Grieve notes words we didn’t hear during last night’s debate:
Chads. Butterfly ballots. Disenfranchisement. Ralph Nader. Dick Cheney’s energy task force. The Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Duck hunting with Antonin Scalia. Fuel efficiency. SUVs. Mars.
Bushs bulge. Jim Jeffords. Paul O’Neill. Richard Clarke. Valerie Plame. Venezuela. Peru. Haiti. Hunger. MoveOn. Lawrence v. Texas. Jim McGreevey. Martha Stewart. The lockbox.
Jose Padilla. Yaser Hamdi. Guantanamo Bay. The death penalty. Miguel Estrada. Judge Roy Moore. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Texas Air National Guard. Alabama. AWOL. The order to shoot down civilian aircraft. “The Pet Goat.”
Ahmed Chalabi. Jessica Lynch. Danny Pearl.
Terror alerts. The Presidential Daily Brief. Condoleezza Rice. Fishing. “Greeted as liberators.” Abu Ghraib.
A number of those are surprising, given some of the headlines over the past four years.