March 18, 2004 | The Bush campaign is twisting the meaning of a quote
from Sen. John Kerry to the breaking point, making it clear that the
president and his supporters will not allow facts to get in their way.
Speaking yesterday at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif.,
Vice President Dick Cheney declared that Sen. John "has given us ample
doubts about his judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on matters
of national security." Cheney's money line in defining the supposedly
weak-on-security Democratic candidate was this: "Senator Kerry has
questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all. Recently he
said, and I quote, 'I don't want to use that terminology.'"

Cheney first debuted the zinger at a South Dakota fundraiser on March 8:
"Several days ago, Senator Kerry said he wasn't even comfortable calling
this a war. He said, 'I don't want to use that terminology.'" President
Bush chimed in the same day at a Texas fundraiser: "Just the other day
my opponent indicated that he's not comfortable using the word 'war' to
describe the struggle we're in. He said, 'I don't want to use that
terminology.'"

On March 13, at another Republican fundraiser in Kentucky, Cheney
repeated the allegation: "On one side, we have the Democratic nominee,
who is uncomfortable with the idea we are at war. Quote, 'I don't want
to use that terminology,' he said last week." Then Cheney repeated the
claim again in California on Wednesday.

But the accusation doesn't jibe with Kerry's recent tough rhetoric. For
instance, on Feb. 28 at UCLA, in a speech on national security, Kerry
spoke about "the war on terror." On March 3, the Kansas City Star
reported that Kerry, in remarks in Washington, D.C., had vowed to "fight
the war on terrorism." This week the Los Angeles Times quoted him
campaigning in West Virginia: "When it comes to protecting the security
of our nation and to winning the war on terror, America is unified."

So where did this I-won't-call-it-a-war-on-terror quote come from? On
March 5, Kerry gave a foreign policy-oriented interview to the New York
Times aboard an airplane. Extended portions of the interview were
printed in the paper, as a sidebar to a news story. At one point Kerry
was addressing the big picture regarding "the war on terror," a phrase
he used repeatedly during the interview. He said, "The combination of
economic, the economic bleakness, the devastation, within countries that
are potentially explosive, where you have very large young populations
of uneducated people ripe for the pickings of radicalism, is a much
bigger challenge than the world as yet has been willing to grapple
with." Kerry concluded, "The final victory in the war on terror depends
on a victory in the war of ideas, much more than the war on the
battlefield. And the war -- not the war, I don't want to use that
terminology. The engagement of economies, the economic transformation,
the transformation to modernity of a whole bunch of countries that have
been avoiding the future. And that future's coming at us like it or not,
in the context of terror, and in the context of failed states, and
dysfunctional economies, and all that goes with that."

There's not a college freshman in America who would read that passage
and suggest Kerry is reluctant to call the struggle against terrorism a
"war." That's simply not what he said. His point was obvious -- the war
on terror, or "the war on the battlefield," is intricately connected
with the war of ideas (economics, modernity, religious fanaticism).

Kerry's phrase about not wanting to "use that [war] terminology" had
nothing to do with Sept. 11, al-Qaida, Madrid or Baghdad. It was Kerry's
clarification to reporters of the distinction between the war on the
battlefield and the battle over ideas. But the Bush campaign is trying
to transform the utterance into a false ideological dividing line.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the cut-and-paste ruse is being promoted by
Bush's tools in the conservative media. Writing for the Wall Street
Journal opinion Web site last week, James Taranto cited Bush's use of
the "terminology" quote and insisted, "Bush's criticisms of Kerry are
based on hard facts."

Better check again.

Eric Boehlert (Salon)

It's HUGE !

http://www.geocities.com/easy2free2003/funny.htm