Crossing the Line?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Senator Edwards’s hysterics over comments Vice President Cheney offered to a crowd in Des Moines Tuesday tell a lot about the Democrats’ insecurities. What the vice president told 350 Iowans was this: “It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, that we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we will get hit again, and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States. And then we will fall back into the pre 9-11 mindset, if you will.”


This caused the Tarheel to fume that “Dick Cheney’s scare tactics today crossed the line. What he said to the American people was, if you go to the polls in November and elect anyone other than us, then another terrorist attack occurs, it’s your fault. This is un-American.”


Un-American? We thought this was what the whole election was about. Take it from Senator Kerry, who said in Cincinnati: “As president, I will set a new direction. We’re going to defend this country here at home. We’re going to do all we possibly can to protect it from another terrorist attack. And we’re going to make homeland security a priority, not a political slogan.” Mr. Kerry charged that President Bush’s policies have created “havens for terrorists that weren’t there before.”


At the Democratic National Convention, Mr. Kerry promised to “fight a smarter, more effective war on terror.” The senator said his diplomatic acumen would enable America to “get the terrorists before they get us.” Mr. Edwards himself invoked the specter of September 11 in his convention speech, saying “we have to do more to fight terrorism and protect our country” and insisting that he and Mr. Kerry would “do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to make sure that never happens again, not to our America.”


From the podium at the Fleet Center, Senator Mikulski of Maryland even asserted that a Kerry-Edwards administration would “make our country safer. That means no more 9/11s.”Mr.Edwards has yet to condemn those comments as un-American.


The truth is that this is the debate Messrs. Kerry and Edwards wanted. The Democratic Party stuffed its national convention chock-full of military pomp and army generals and grainy videos of a young Mr. Kerry in the Mekong Delta. It’s only now – when it turns out the American people aren’t buying it – that the Kerry campaign is running away from the terrorism issue. So, after months of insisting that the Bush administration had made the country more vulnerable to terrorism, the Democrats are trying to take the issue off the table.


The New York Sun

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