summerkc

In an interview with Time magazine Sunday Kerry said: 'We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'

Does anyone else see this as a dangerous way of thinking of the war on terrorism. I don't think that the first WTC attack, USS Cole bombing, etc, which killed americans, was a nuisance that just had to be tolerated. I see it as a warning that went unheeded by both sides and showed the terrorists that we were not serious about protecting ourselves.

I dont think that any president anymore can think of the threat that we face is a nuisance. It is dangerous and irresponsible and I think it gets to the heart of the differnce that Bush and Kerry have about this problem.

ARTelevision

Dangerous perhaps, but I can see it as potentially very popular. This is want people want, after all - to be able to carry their 9/10 mindset forward into the televised future.

__________________
create evolution

martinguerre

did he say 1990 was a good year? 1995? 2000?

No. What he said was that total victory against anti-western and anti-american forces is unlikely. What is crucial is to limit their power and ability to operate until they present a far diminished threat.

hannukah harry

nothing quite as tasty as a quote out of context, eh?

__________________
shabbat shalom, mother fucker! - the hebrew hammer

kutulu

kind of reminds me of the "global test" "quote." Take a long statement that doesn't support your candidate and reduce it to two words in an attempt to make the opposition look like a bafoon.

Paq

even taking it as presented, yes, i want to go back to a time when terrorism was a nuisance and i didn't read about at least 15 american deaths a day from iraqi resistance...

now, i will say that i want the intelligence communities, spec ops, etc fighting the terrorists, fighting to keep the country safe, but i'd much rather have better security here and at the embasies, etc, wehre americans are than to randomly invade other countries....ok, not randomly, but still

sorry, it's 5 am...

__________________
Live.

Chris

host

1.) 37 months have passed since a signifigant terrorist attack was carried
out in the U.S.
2.) 32 months after the Dec. 7,1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, allied troops
liberated Paris (Aug., 1944).
3.) The Bush administration promised that every American would have a job
to do "in the war on terror".
4.) The Homeland Security Admin.'s "color coded" alerts have been discredited
by their vagueness, coincidental (at best) coordination with newsworthy
events that have the potential to cause negative opinion of the Bush
administration if the public was not distracted by a sudden, new terror
alert.
5.) Impact of the 9-11 Commission and Weapons Inspection reports that
all but eliminate Bush/Cheney's original justifications for invading Iraq.
6.) Bush's personal behavior; self described as the "war president", then
this year, as "the peace president", Bush's record setting pace of
vacation time during "his war", and campaigning full time when he is
not flying back to his Texas ranch. Avoidance of news conferences for
the last 6 months, and limiting his public appearances only to
"audiences pre-screened for loyalty", who offer only praise and softball
questions to Bush. (Except for the 2 debates, and we saw how they
went!)
All in all, the message about the gravity of the "war on terror" as it is projected by this administration to the American people, the remoteness of
the actual fighting of "the war", the passage of considerable time since we
were seriously attacked, and the distance that Bush and Cheney keep between themselves and their countrymen who are not partisan Republicans,
makes it obvious why Kerry could "dare" to downplay the hyping of the "war"
that the Bush administration has put so much effort into since 9-11. The
party conventions and the 3 debates reveal that the administration's message
to the people is "all fear, all of the time", while the democrats barely mentioned the "war on terror" at their convention, and emphasized in the debates that the judgment of Bush and Cheney and their domestic and foreign policies,as they relate to the "war on terror" seem seriously flawed
and short on an open dialogue on where we truly are in the "war", as well as
where Bush/Cheney intend to take us!

Paq

host, i'm not sure if we agree or not...I do like the info in your post, but i don't see wehre you went with it..

I think i agree with the message ,the war on terror seems seriously flawed and the "all fear, all the time" card being played.

I just think the 'average' american would prefer to leave the safety of the country in the hands of the intel agencies and people who know what they are doing and get on with life instead of constantly being bombarded wtih doom and gloom messages, a terror alert system that goes a whopping 2 steps beyond a stop light and a president whose message is, "you're for us or you're against us"

I guess i dont' see black and white as well as i take pictures in greyscale I simply don't understand the republican party anymore....I mean, you're right, the RNC was "we're doomed if kerry is elected, we need strong leadership' even if he's wrong...strong and wrong is better? I dont' get it. I'd rather have a multi-tasking govt, i guess...I like knowing someone is worrying about issues other than whom to bomb today...

__________________
Live.

Chris

scout

http://www.ejectejecteject.com/

I think this link describes the way I feel about this election much more accurately than I ever could. It's a long read but worth it IMO.

pan6467

Funny how the right jumps on Kerry saying he wants to reduce terrorism to a nuisance and a couple weeks ago Bush refuted himself and said "the war on terrorism can never be won." (OF course now he says it can be won again).

I'd rather have a president that changes terrorism into a nuisance than one who says, we won't stop till we beat it..... but we can't ever truly defeat terrorism..... if you elect my opponent there will be more attacks..... if you elect me I'll defeat terrorism..... meanwhile 2 of his "axis of terror countries, Iran and N. Korea" are laughing at him, OBL and Al Quida are aldoing their thing and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is turning into a quagmire.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

Rekna

Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser in the first Bush administration.

kutulu

Since nobody has posted the full quote:

Read the whole quote and then draw your conclusions on what he said.

My interpretation is that he first recognizes the opinion that terrorism will always exist in some way. Next he states that his goal is that since terrorism cannot totally eliminated, we will work to minimize it as much as possible.

What exactly is wrong with that opinion?

densefog

A vote for Kerry is a vote for Jessie Jackson as Sec. of State!

Paxton_Free

It's quite delicious to all the responsible journalists that are political pundits.

Lebell

My problem with that opinion and the plethera of posts here is that it is this EXACT SAME OPINION that lead up to the bombing of the Cole, the FIRST WTC bombing and the SECOND WTC bombing as well as numerous other embassy/hotel/base attacks.

IT WASN'T WORKING, PEOPLE!

__________________
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

The ONLY sponsors we have are YOU!

Please Donate!

Journeyman

Precautions are all good and well, but what's wrong with wanting to stop shitting myself everytime Tom Ridge comes out with a Code Orange? I don't think Kerry's going to mess about with security measures and operations pertaining to terrorism, and I take his statement to mean that the average American can stop living in fear. I find this to be very appealing about Kerry, as I consider Bush to be manipulating Americans through fear for various purposes.

kutulu

So are you saying that it is possible to completely eliminate terrorism?

noodles

*cough cough*
twoish months ago, this was said by GWB:
kerry attacked him for saying it, and bush subsequently changed his stance on it.

i think you can draw your own conclusions. do these guys even realize that what they say is being recorded somewhere?

kutulu

Of course nobody was calling Bush a waffler for it...

filtherton

Maybe kerry simply claiming that he doesn't want to exploit the fear of terrorism to further his own political agenda. At least, not to the extent that bush has.

noodles

just as a secondary point:
homeland security budget: ~$40 bil/year
war in iraq: +$140bil and growing daily

priorities seem a little skewed, imho, if he's looking ot combat terrorism or prevent it on the homeland.
i can't find the numbers, but i wonder how much he's spending to, you know, find osama and stop al qaeda? the people who actually committed the terrorist attacks, which iraq did not do?

kutulu

Devoting large resources just to find Osama is shortisghted (although we would get redemption from it). Chances are we could catch a lot more guys by focusing on AQ as a whole instead of trying to find a particular person. If Osama happens to be one of them, great; if not, he's living on borrowed time anyways with his kidney problems.

noodles

undoubtedly true
but i don't think osama is in iraq
nor do i think iraq flew any planes into our buildings

the war on terror as morphed into the war on iraq and more money has gone to fund the iraq war than the one involving terror.

and bush said "I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent". looks like he decided to divert instead. the us wants to know: where's my goddamn <strike>osama head on a stake</strike> <strike>wmd's</strike> <strike>dignity</strike> pants?

onetime2

Ummm, yes they were. He was soundly criticized for it and was painted as changing his mind.

__________________
Strive to be more curious than ignorant.

noodles

i think his point was that it was downplayed and more on the quiet side, by and large, because bush is a 'steadfast leader' not a 'waffler'. i didn't know about this until recently and i thought i was following events reasonably well. right now its much more popular to pick out kerry's switching stances and more hell would likely be raised if it was kerry who did what bush did.

trickyy

i think his position is realistic, although right now terrorism shouldn't even be a nuisance. it occurs too infrequently to affect the average person. i've received indignant responses for talking about the statistical insignificance of terrorism before, but here are some examples to back up my claim:

http://www.anxietyandstress.com/sys-...hataretheodds/

so even if wily terrorists managed to attack a mall every week, one would still be relatively safe. it is kind of morbid to talk about this, but even if there was a sustained outbreak of terrorism of this nature, one would still be more likely to encounter any of the following situations:

odds of other happenings:

i don't want to be misinterpreted as saying that a terrorist attack is impossible. but according to these numbers, it is unlikely to directly affect the average American.

Rekna

77 to 1.... scary

roadkill

you forgot this odd " Odds of getting away with murder: 2 to 1" that i think is in america no?

Rekna

(not to derail but how was that 77 to 1 stat calculated? if it is correct you would expect 1 person out of 77 to die every year from traffic deaths and that is simply not true)

Lebell

That, I don't know the answer to.

What I do know is that what happened under Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, and Clinton was clearly unacceptable, in that it led up to 9/11 and that I don't see any difference in what Kerry is proposing than what Clinton did.

__________________
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

The ONLY sponsors we have are YOU!

Please Donate!

kutulu

Oh please, give a real answer. It seems like you can't admit that terrorism will not be eliminated because you would be giving credibility to Kerry's statement.

roachboy

kerry' statement on the weekend about terrorism seems perfectly reasonable to me.

one thing for sure, though: such a relation to the category "terrorist" (whatever that means) would be impossible under another bush term.

it would be consistent for an administration as ideologically backward and intellectually vacant as the present one to legitimate itself by obsessing over an empty image, one that it can neither understand nor work to effect in any way, and to manage something even worse in the process: to hand its enemies a powerful mobilizing too, if only because bush speaks a version of the same language.

what the right has been trying to do is to persuade folk that the only course is the present one because change would indicate a lack of resolve.
what amazes me about this argument is that anyone buys it.
if you have an self-defeating, myopic policy, what good would it do to follow it because it exists?
for example, how has the debacle of iraq, and the theater of limitations on american military power, helped the "war on terror", even if you accept the administrations fatuous discourse of the Will?
why is the right so reluctant to hold their boy bush to account for this?
what is the appeal of a fantasy of resolve over a policy orientation that might actually be more open to complexity in the world?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

^Ice_Bat^

I totally agree with you. Kerry wants to go back to the "good ol' days when terrorists are a nuisance" and they just metastasize into this giant threat? We let them grow and grow until they are powerful again and September 11th happens all over again? We allow these threats to continue to proliferate in the world? I don't think anyone in their right mind could honestly say that September 11th, the cole bombings, U.S. embassy bombings, and numerous other attacks did not prove to Americans, as well as other nations that terrorism is a grave threat to every nation. If people buy into this liberal nonsense, then sadly it may take another September 11th for people to get their heads back on straight.

__________________
If you ever catch on fire, try to avoid looking in a mirror, because I bet that will really throw you into a panic. - Jack Handy

kutulu

If that's what you get from the what he said you are either (a) reading a shortened version of it or (b) not reading it at all:

It's right there in plain English.

filtherton

If people don't buy into this "liberal nonsense" it will take another september 11th to prove to them that bush can't and won't make them any safer.

cthulu23

This statement is inaccurate. Security is a huge issue with US citizens. We live in a society where a woman hysterical over the presence of arab men on her airplane becomes a brief celebrity even though air marshalls on that same flight basically called her a nut. This is a society where one of the defining issues of a Presidential election revolves around the candidates willingness to invade other nations and how quickly and effectively they wil "kill" the terrorists (both Kerry and Bush love to drop that line). We are a deeply paranoid and hostile nation, plain and simple, including the Democrats and John Kerry.

Others can stockpile duct tape and platic sheeting if that makes them feel more secure. As for myself, I'm going to invest in some no-slip bath mats as I am much more likely to die from slipping in the tub then in a terrorist attack.

Note: vigilance is a good thing, hypervigilance probably isn't.

hannukah harry

what exactly is it that they did that was unacceptable?

__________________
shabbat shalom, mother fucker! - the hebrew hammer

trickyy

yeah, that seems quite wrong. maybe it's supposed to be just a metaphor. "you got away with murder in that speech!" seriously, i'm not sure where they got the numbers...murder charges vs. convictions? still seems wrong, unless manslaughter doesn't count as murder.

so that odds page is a little suspect. here is a (hopefully) better source.

http://www.mythweb.com/teachers/win/odds.html

martinguerre

http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/images/war.008.gif
Terrorism is a management issue, not an elimination one. I think reasonable folks can agree on this, while disagreeing on the "acceptable" level. But the stated goal of removing all terrorism in a binary "with us/against us" rubric does not do the situation justice. Activities that remove a threat today may create several new ones tomorrow...making that last martyr, just to "end" terrorism...is just going to breed new ones. Security measures must improve, of that i am utterly convinced.

But frankly, while most shipping is unscreened, and new militants are being recruited every day in Iraq...i don't see the situation getting better. Evenually, we must look to the causes, and try to mollify anti-American sentiment. It is possible, with out sacrificing who we are.

America is not an evil empire. We must reform our policies and actions in the Islamic world...but it's not as if we must kowtow to the most extreme branches. We need to make them irrelevant by not providing them with a handy scapegoat.