From Nuisance to Myth
Just recently Kerry said terrorism should just be a nuisance; now the left admits it’s all just a myth to begin with.
Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, the series argues, “is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media.” The series’ explanation for this is even bolder: “In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.” guardian.co.uk
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During long interviews on the subject with The New York Times Magazine, Kerry seemed to play down terrorism. He even made the shocking claim that Sept. 11 “didn’t change me much at all.” tallahassee.com
Yes, the left continues to astound. Democrats go on and on, hysterically ranting about Bush’s ‘politics of fear’ and Republican ‘scare mongering’ while spreading baseless lies about a looming draft if Bush is reelected. (Even going so far as to introduce the legislation themselves.) Liberal politicians decry a total lack of security under Bush, but also ridicule terror alerts as attempts to just scare voters.
‘The politics of fear’ is a phrase used almost exclusively by liberals as a political attack against conservatives. The left’s political position, as evidenced by such attacks, is essentially that 9/11 never happened. Al Qaeda is just a nuisance. Not because of pesky bombings and beheadings, as it turns out, but because the war on terror diverts precious tax dollars from the war on poverty. Kerry attacked Bush for ‘overspending’ on Iraq, because it neglected the social welfare apparatus.
“200 billion dollars. That’s what we are spending in Iraq because George Bush chose to go it alone,” Kerry says in the ad, to start airing Monday in 13 competitive states where he is on the air. “Now the president tells us we don’t have the resources to take care of health care and education here at home. That’s wrong.” suntimes.com
Not enough money for healthcare, social security, education, foodstamps… The same reason that tax cuts are a nuisance and you should be paying more. Remember Democrats asking, “Where’s the shared sacrifice?” …That Bush hasn’t asked enough of America?
The nuisance theory and the myth theory both arise from the same liberal worldview. This BBC series,The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear illustrates the extent to which the liberal viewpoint can go.
You hear it in the speeches of Kerry and Edwards, ‘the politics of fear’, as much as in BBC propaganda documentaries.
The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have “sleeper cells”. It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence. guardian.co.uk
This is the real difference between the two candidates. One believes this is WWIII and the other thinks 9/11 was an anomoly which unfortunately rose above the level of nuisance to detract from the real war: on poverty. A war, in which, if we were to judge it’s generals (the DNC) by the same standard that Kerry is attempting to judge Bush would warrant a court martial.
Still, for all of Kerry’s tough talk about prosecuting the war on terror ‘smarter’ and more ‘effectively’, he has yet to articulate his vision of what the war on terror is beyond platitudes. Matt Bai seems to believe Kerry when he argues he somehow understood the threat from Al Qaeda long before 9/11, but Kerry has not yet shown that he understands how 9/11 changed the strategic environment.
When Kerry first told me that Sept. 11 had not changed him, I was surprised. I assumed everyone in America — and certainly in Washington — had been changed by that day. I assumed he was being overly cautious, afraid of providing his opponents with yet another cheap opportunity to call him a flip-flopper. What I came to understand was that, in fact, the attacks really had not changed the way Kerry viewed or talked about terrorism — which is exactly why he has come across, to some voters, as less of a leader than he could be. He may well have understood the threat from Al Qaeda long before the rest of us. And he may well be right, despite the ridicule from Cheney and others, when he says that a multinational, law-enforcement-like approach can be more effective in fighting terrorists. But his less lofty vision might have seemed more satisfying — and would have been easier to talk about in a political campaign — in a world where the twin towers still stood. nytimes.com
