News Needs to Start Picking Up the Reality Check

When they start to argue about "what happens 'if,' " instead of "what happens 'when,'" you know that its time to call for the Reality Check, tip a penny, and get home in time to catch a Survivor re-run.

The New York Times makeover into the insane intellectual's favorite watering hole and Hooters franchise continues apace today with this fresh hooter steaming in middle of the dependably insane editorial columns.

If John Kerry was elected president, Mr. Cheney warned the crowd, "the danger is that we'll get hit again." In a long, rather rambling statement, he said the United States might then fall back into a "pre-9/11 mind-set" that "these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts." -- A Disgraceful Campaign Speech

The 'long ramble' between the two clauses quoted above amounts to this:

" ....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. -- Remarks by the Vice President

You can make up your own mind about the extent to which the Times is cherry-picking the original statement for its own dull purposes. Julian Sanchez at Hit & Run parses the statement well and shines some light on the use of it as "a partisan tactic or an attempt to generate a news story."

It is both really and is working well in this forgettable news cycles on all counts.

What isn't emerging is the truth about the situation. And that truth is that as far as the next "hit" is concerned it really, as one of my friends said many months ago in email, "doesn't matter one tinker's damn who gets elected, it will happen anyway."

He's right and he's right beyond the 99.9999999% limit. As we count down to the sad 3rd anniversary of September 11, breathes there a man with mind so dead that he does not believe to the core of his being that a second, third and other terrorist attacks on the United States soil is anything other than inevitable? If there is he is certainly running for re-election.

We can do and have done many things to increase "homeland security." We can do much, much more -- much of which we will not do. We could seal the entire country in tanzanite, we could shrink-wrap it in ideology, we could cause the resurrection and deployment of the Stasi, the Waffen SS, the Gestapo and the Republican Guard along our borders and throughout our nation, and we would still be attacked on American soil again and again. To paraphrase Frank Zappa over there on my side bar, "there's a lot of ways to delay that trouble comin' every day, but there's no way to avoid it."

This idea that because "he's kept the country safe since 9/11, ergo you will be safe forever if you vote for George Bush" is intellectual clap-trap. The counter-argument that "John Kerry will involve the French and Germans and jump-start international love for America and keep us safe forever" is the equal but opposite horse-apple. Both are lies and mean exactly nothing.

The real issue here at the bottom line on the Reality check is: "When the next attack comes, and the attacks after that, what, exactly, is the next President of the United States prepared to do about it?" For that answer, the only place to look is the one place the Times and the media do not want the voters to look -- at the record of the two candidates.

Posted by Vanderleun at September 9, 2004 6:02 AM