I hate to sound too one-sided because, although I do agree with many stereotypical "Liberal" ideals, I try to remain philosophically objective. Besides, I don't normally vote (for epistemological reasons) and I'm Canadian (so U.S. politics shouldn't really concern me). But Bush really makes it hard to stay on the fence. This latest attack on Kerry by Bush and his supporters concerning the nuisance "quote" makes the hair on the back on my neck stand up, reminding me of all that is wrong with politics, human nature and democracy. All loyalty aside, let's ignore the grammatical, logical and intentional meaning behind the words.
Kerry said "reduce terrorism to a nuisance level". Bush turns this into saying that terrorism IS a nuisance and mocks him for such naivete. Grammatically, Kerry's words explicitly means that terrorism is NOT a nuisance (since we have to reduce it to achieve such an equivalence). Again, ignoring any value judgement of the words, although nuisances are still bad, reducing terrorism from a major everyday horrific occurence (which I assume everyone thinks it is) to a less horrifying but still bad rarity is logically an great increase in goodness. And finally, Kerry's point seemed not to be that terrorism is unimportant but that by its nature it is impossible to stop entirely (without destroying all semblance of freedom for the innocent). Regardless of your political position, you can't argue with that. Or can you?
2 comments:
*Grand Applause* Here here!!
now if only the american public wouls stop buying into Bush's interpretation...he seems to do that far too often.
The problem is that it is such an easy interpretation to accept. It's easy to look at all that's happening in the world and think "CRAP, I'm scared of dying... I want a president that will go out and kick ass before anything bad happens to me, right or wrong." Whether Bush is that president or not (I think he is), he's certainly closer to that than Kerry.
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