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October 11, 2004

Kerry's nuances of nuisances

I posted yesterday the Kerry quote from the New York Times. I didn't comment much beyond that it was unbelievable at that time because, well, frankly it stunned me beyond words.

The Bush campaign has rightly seized on this incredible statement and turned it into a new campaign ad. Michele provides a list of dates of events and wonders just which one is the one Kerry wants to get "back to," which one represents that magical moment when terrorism was just a nuisance like "prostitution and gambling."

James Lileks certainly finds the words I couldn't:

Mosquito bites are a nuisance. Cable outages are a nuisance. Someone shooting up a school in Montana or California or Maine on behalf of the brave martyrs of Fallujah isn't a nuisance. It's war.

But that's not the key phrase. This matters: We have to get back to the place we were.

But when we were there we were blind. When we were there we losing. When we were there we died. We have to get back to the place we were. We have to get back to 9/10? We have to get back to the place we were. So we can go through it all again? We have to get back to the place we were. And forget all we’ve learned and done? We have to get back to the place we were. No. I don’t want to go back there. Planes into towers. That changed the terms. I am remarkably disinterested in returning to a place where such things are unimaginable. Where our nighmares are their dreams.

Now, many of the left-leaning blogs (and pro-Kerry media like ABC) are complaining that the "terrorism is like prostitution" is being taken out of context. Certainly, if the Bush Campaign, or anyone else were doing a Dowdification of Kerry's statement (where elipses change the quote to mean the opposite of what it did in context, a specialty of Queen Screed, Maureen Dowd), the complaints would be legitimate.

However, the complaints are not. Kerry is the one that chooses the analogy to prostitution and gambling. He's the one that frames terrorism as law enforcement issue. He could have easily met the issue of the ideology of Islamism head on. He could have easily made the analogy that it is the modern day equivalent of Nazism and fascism, which live on in tiny pockets -- isolated, tracked and prosecuted when necessary. He could have easily said he wanted to move forward to that place where Islamism was as thoroughly defeated as Nazism was.

Kerry did not make that more appropriate analogy.

Last I looked, the Mafia wasn't issuing fatwas that non-mafia types were to be converted or killed. Last I looked, when the IRS took over the Mustang ranch, it wasn't because the girls where videotaping the murder of their customers with demands to make Nevada a prostitute-only nation. Last I looked, backroom poker-players and bookies weren't invading schools and shooting school children in the back.

Kerry downplays Islamist terrorism. He makes the deliberate analogy to criminal nuisances rather than to historical anti-Western ideologies. Certainly, John Kerry is not a stupid man. Why does he reveal such a lack of understanding? Well, from the same NYTimes article comes this quote:

“We need to engage more directly and more respectfully with Islam, with the state of Islam, with religious leaders, mullahs, imams, clerics, in a way that proves this is not a clash with the British and the Americans and the old forces they remember from the colonial days,” Kerry told me during a rare break from campaigning, in Seattle at the end of August. “And that’s all about your diplomacy.”

Only John Kerry knows why he wants to return to failed strategy. Only John Kerry knows if the reason he pushes the talk-talk while terrorists kill-kill is because he is pandering to the Leftists poised to take over his own party or is still trying to show the elite of European salons he is one of them.

Whatever the reason, John Neville Kerry's "Peace through Nuisance" strategy is wrong now, wrong then and wrong for the future.

Posted by Darleen at October 11, 2004 07:08 AM

Comments

I think I can clear that up - Kerry was talking about what terrorism should be, not what it is now.

See, words have what we call "tenses," which denote comment on a present reality or a future possibility.

If you oppose Kerry's statement, then you are saying that you want to keep terrorism as a prominent top threat. Why?

I would certainly want a world in which terrorism was not so disruptive and threatening, so I agree with Kerry. Is there some reason you would want terrorism to persist as such a major threat to us?

Posted by: Binacontenda at October 13, 2004 10:11 PM

Scott

My criticism of Kerry has nothing to do with tenses. It has to do with an entirely inappropriate analogy on substance, not level.

There is no "ideology" to prostitution, no matter how rampant. Islamist terrorism is, by definition, ideologically driven.

Kerry's analogy to a non-ideological event was not innocent.

Posted by: Darleen at October 13, 2004 10:36 PM