Terror as Nuisance
Now John Kerry sees terror as a "nuisance," in a puff piece in the New York Times Magazine. Tad Devine, spinner for the Kerry campaign, has just said that his candidate will protect this nation just as he protected it as a young man in Vietnam. What first occurs to me is that, as a young man, Kerry's method of "protection" was to protect himself first, to escape combat early, using a seldom-invoked a loophole, leaving the rest of his band of brothers to the tender mercies of the enemy, without himself taking any further risk. Now he is being quoted as saying, in effect, that the deaths of his countrymen, if they are few enough, and infrequent enough, should be only a "nuisance" to the rest of us, who will be either lucky enough to escape the attacks, or wealthy enough to have a bodyguard detail (or smart enough to have married a woman who can afford to protect us with one). He actually compares terrorist attacks to prostitution and gambling. This comparison amounts to nothing less than capitulation to terror; an expression that terror attacks are as unavoidable and ubiquitous as these victimless crimes. Terror bombing a nuisance? Only if the victim is someone else.While the quote may seem funny, it is in fact the most serious display of the difference between the candidates on this most important of issues. While Bush sees the war as a, well, war, Kerry sees it, as his predecessor, B.J. Clinton did, as a law enforcement problem. Incredibly, as if 9/11 never happened, and its lessons were lost on him, he still sees this as something in which we can wait for the next "crime" to be committed, and then we can go after the perpetrators, and bring the "cowardly criminals" to justice. The entire quote:
''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' Kerry said. ''As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''This entire election, and indeed the entire thrust of our response to the Jihadi threat to our very way of life, depends upon Kerry's success or failure in convincing half of the electorate that 9/11 was an anomaly that will never be repeated. We all wish that it were so. Kerry's candidacy hinges upon his ability to get voters to commit our nation to this vision of wishful thinking. Bush's incumbency hinges on our willingness to continue to take positive steps to change the situation.
More than that, this election depends, more than any other in my memory, on the ability of the challenger to pull the wool over the eyes of the electorate. He started with 40% that would vote for a yellow dog if it were standing against President Bush. In order to garner the other 10% he relies on lies and obfuscation. His response to the charge that he refers to terrorism as a nuisance is that his words have been taken out of context. Read the entire article, in context, and make up your own mind. The article is a puff piece on him, a very kind depiction of the candidate calculated to make him more acceptable as a candidate for the nation's highest office. Read it, and you will see the entire contest, in context. This is an election between the 9/11 survivors, and the wishful thinkers who would like to return to a 9/10 world where the radical Islamic fascists who wish to kill enough of us to force the rest of us to pay the jizzya (the tax that Islamic governments charge to Christians and Jews) are still "cowardly criminals," and no threat to the American mainland. The democrats are using a combination of Goebbels-style propaganda and Stalinist big lie theory, even as they say that Carl Rove is the new Goebbels, and Bush is the new Hitler. In the most massively negative, most dishonest campaign in memory, this is, more than anything else, a test of just how gullible the American people are.
Links: On page six of the article is the quote. Here is the link to page one of the article if you want to read it all. The New York Times Magazine front page if you need to register (free, but a nuisance) in order to read the puff piece. Note to Senator Kerry - registering for the NYT is a nuisance; having your family killed is terror, and a tragedy. Your confusion of the two is the reason you shall fail to gain the White House. To call you out of touch with the common people is an understatement equal to your underestimation of the importance of Jihadi terror to the electorate.