The radical-left Pacifica Radio network, enriched by subsidies from Corporation for Public Broadcasting, attempted to have a Third Party Day on its Democracy Now! program on Thursday. Only other radical leftist presidential candidates – Ralph Nader and Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney – were present. They claimed Libertarian Bob Barr and Constitution Party nominee Chuck Baldwin bowed out. Host Amy Goodman played clips of the final debate, and asked the lefties to chime in on Bob Schieffer's questions. When it came to the Ayers part of the debate, Nader raged that Ayers is a small-time saboteur next to those "clinically verifiable mass terrorists," George Bush and Dick Cheney. First he praised the public-spirited activists of ACORN:

Second, on the Bill Ayers thing, who is a lapsed small-time saboteur with the Weather Underground many years ago, what should have been said was the big-time terrorists, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, these are clinically verifiable mass terrorists who have killed innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in their criminal wars of aggression. These are criminal wars of aggression. These are war crimes. These are war criminals.

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They have killed over a million Iraqi civilians as a result of that criminal invasion. That’s where the discussion should have focused on. The big-time terrorists, the state terrorists in the White House who have violated our Constitution, our statutes and our international treaties, and have been condemned even by the American Bar Association for a continual violence of our—violation of our Constitution.

Rambling Ralph also declared that if Barack Obama and John McCain wanted to keep the press away from silly gaffes, they would merely need to adopt a socialist agenda working with local citizen groups, and voila! The press would behave:

Well, first of all, the reason why the press covers the lowest common denominator of gaffes or tactics or horse races or what someone said in a crowd is because Obama and McCain do not open up in their discussion day after day significant issues such as Cynthia McKinney just alluded to. You know, they say the same thing day after day after day, and so the press has to have a cheap lede, and they go with these gaffes or these diversions.

If McCain and Obama really opened up all the huge variety of redirections and reforms and what’s going on in the country and allied themselves with local—local citizen groups who are fighting for justice, there would be news every day, and the reporters would not be as inclined to headline these gaffes or these so-called smears from different supporters of Obama and McCain. So it’s a combined responsibility of the candidates who open up this kind of foolishness and silly coverage, because they’re so redundant, they’re so ditto heads on the campaign trail.

—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center.