this article makes me wonder just how far the GOP will go to keep the White House
this scare tactic is appalling...
Cheney ties election result to chance of terror attack
USA Today
Jill Lawrence and Richard Benedetto
USATODAY
The presidential campaign spiked to a new level of rhetorical heat Tuesday
when Vice President Cheney warned that a vote for Democrat John Kerry could
bring terrorist attacks on the USA.
Speaking to supporters in Des Moines, Cheney called it “absolutely
essential” that on Election Day voters “make the right choice. Because if we make the
wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, and we'll be hit in
a way that will be devastating.”
Cheney's remarks overshadowed accusatory exchanges by Kerry and President
Bush over Iraq and drew a response from North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Kerry's
running mate.
“Dick Cheney's scare tactics crossed the line today,” he said. Protecting
America from “vicious terrorists” is not a partisan issue, and Cheney and Bush
ought to know that, Edwards said.
Cheney said the nation under a Kerry presidency could “fall back into a
pre-9/11 mind-set,” which he described as viewing terrorist attacks as “just
criminal acts” and the nation as “not really at war.”
Kerry, a fourth-term Massachusetts senator, Vietnam combat veteran and former
prosecutor, often says America is at war and maintains he could fight a more
effective war on terrorism than Bush. Today he planned to spotlight what he
calls Bush's wrong decisions on Iraq with a speech at the Cincinnati Museum
Center at Union Terminal, the same place Bush made the case for war in October
2002.
At the time, Bush argued that Saddam Hussein had to be ousted because he was
“harboring terrorists” and had weapons of mass destruction. Stockpiles of such
weapons have not been found. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission found no
cooperative relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
“The truth is, there are terrorists there that were not there before we went
in” to Iraq, Kerry said Tuesday at a town meeting in Greensboro, N.C. But
Bush, campaigning in Lee's Summit, Mo., said that “we were right to make America
safer by removing Saddam Hussein from power.”
Even as Bush and Kerry visit battleground states and express concern about
voters without jobs or health care, the Iraq war remains at the forefront.
Voters ask about it, and the candidates use it against each other: Bush to cast
doubt on Kerry's consistency, Kerry to cast doubt on Bush's judgment.
In Lee's Summit, the president drew chuckles from a crowd of 5,000 when he
said that Kerry “woke up yesterday morning with yet another new position, and
this one is not even his own. It is that of his onetime rival Howard Dean.”
The president said Kerry “even used the same words Howard Dean used back when
he supposedly disagreed with him.” Bush said invading Iraq was the right
thing to do “no matter how many times Sen. Kerry flip-flops.”
Kerry said this week that Iraq is “the wrong war in the wrong place at the
wrong time.” Dean made a similar remark in February 2003, a month before the
invasion.
In May 2003, Kerry was asked whether it was the right move at the right time.
“I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but
I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein,” he said,
reflecting the belief at the time that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Kerry voted to authorize the war in 2002 but urged Bush to proceed slowly and
give diplomacy a chance to work. On Tuesday he claimed that Bush's wrong
decisions at every step have cost American lives and, so far, $200 billion. “He
chose the date of the start of this war,” Kerry told several hundred fans at the
Greensboro town meeting. “And he chose for America to go it alone. And today
all of America is paying this price.”
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