i'm sure he wouldn't have considered it a nuisance if they'd attacked the UN instead--after all, if that had happened, where would he have had his secret non-existent summit with the security council?

i keep telling myself this guy is not for real, but i know it's wishful thinking.

"i keep telling myself this guy is not for real, but i know it's wishful thinking."

Funny, that's what I've been saying about Bush for the past 4 years.

A pity that Kerry didn't actually call terrorism a "nuisance." This is a dishonest blog entry. I am disappointed.

actually, it seems that he did. as quoted on abovetopsecret.com, quoting the NYT story, 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… I know we're never going to end prostitution,” Kerry told Times interviewer Matt Bai. “We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."

sen. kerry seems to think that we used to be someplace, and while we were in this place, terrorism was not the focus of our lives, but rather a nuisance--his sentence implies that terrorism existed in the past, but at a level that was merely bothersome, hence his analogy of illegal gambling and prostitution, implicit in which is the claim that terrorism can at some level be compared to gambling and prositution. the difference between betting and people blowing up nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons seems to me so great that his comparison is either careless or meaningless, or it betrays a complete misunderstanding of what sort of beast terrorism is. thus, he has rightfully come under fire for these remarks.

He did not say that terrorism is a nuisance. He said that he intends to reduce terrorism to the level of a nuisance. Why is this controversial? It is only controversial when the intended meaning of this statement, which is exceptionally clear, is turned on its it. This is dishonest.

on one level, this is simply a semantic game. if he intends to reduce terrorism 'to the level of' a nuisance, when accomplished, terrorism, by sen. kerry's definition, could properly be labeled as something rather like, well, a 'nuisance'. this is exactly what he states terrorism was in the past: "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance…" the clear implication, or 'intended meaning', is that terrorism used to be a nuisance, but is not anymore.

the 'exceptionally clear' meaning of the statement is exactly why it is controversial. many people, and i include myself in this group, take issue with the view that terrorism ever, under any circumstances, could be considered as insignificant as a nuisance, or as something subsisting at the somewhat wordier 'level of a nuisance'. locking my keys in the car is a nuisance. having to wait in a traffic jam is a nuisance. people blowing themselves up down the street, no matter how infrequently, is not a nuisance, nor will it ever be under any reasonable definition, any more than someone might consider mass murder to be a nuisance.

the point of the cartoon is to show how callous and silly this view is, and, by juxtaposing sen. kerry's words to the actual reality of the past couple of decades, how disrespectful it is toward those involved in pre-sept. 11 attacks.

i fail to see a single dishonest word in this post or in people taking sen. kerry to task for it.

E.: Point taken, thank you. I'm not convinced, but I appreciate the time you took to explain your position.

hey, thanks--no problem.