WashPost Boner on Cheney Speech

The Washington Post’s report on Dick Cheney’s speech (09/07) in Iowa strikes me as plainly misleading. "Cheney Says ‘Wrong Choice’ Risks Terrorist Attack" is the headline. What should follow is an article showing Cheney saying, in effect, ‘Vote Bush-Cheney or else the United States may suffer another terrorist attack.’ Which, if the vice president said it, is definitely news.

Here’s the paragraph from the Cheney speech:

We made decisions at the end of World War II, at the beginning of the Cold War, when we set up the Department of Defense, and the CIA, and we created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and undertook a bunch of major policy steps that then were in place for the next 40 years, that were key to our ultimate success in the Cold War, that were supported by Democrat and Republican alike -- Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and Gerry Ford and a whole bunch of Presidents, from both parties, supported those policies over a long period of time. We're now at that point where we're making that kind of decision for the next 30 or 40 years, and it's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again. That we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us.

What Cheney is clearly saying is that under a Kerry-Edwards administration, if the United States were attacked by terrorists, we would not pursue the same tough strategy we adopted after 9/11. Instead of striking back and continuing with the Bush Doctrine, we would probably tend toward the pinprick reprisals of Clinton and maybe wait for the United Nations to flex its muscles. We’d "fall back into a pre-9/11 mindset."

In sum, a Kerry administration would likely consider a terrorist attack on the United States merely a crime, rather than a casus belli. Whether you buy this argument or not, it’s not an argument that we’ll suffer a new terrorist attack if a plurality of voters supports Kerry-Edwards in November.

Where the WashPost leads, others follow: Just caught the local news version of this same story on channel 9 in Washington with that independent mind Gordon Petersen.