Kerry: Terrorist Threat Exaggerated

Power Line picks up on an interesting Washington Times article on yesterday's Democratic debate, in which the Times manages to catch something that the NY Times buried and the Washington Post completely ignored:

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts said during last night's Democratic presidential debate that the threat of terrorism has been exaggerated. "I think there has been an exaggeration," Mr. Kerry said when asked whether President Bush has overstated the threat of terrorism. "They are misleading all Americans in a profound way." ...

Sen. John Edwards, who was born in this state and has said he must win here, took the first opportunity to disagree with Mr. Kerry, the victor in both the binding Democratic contests held so far — the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. "It's just hard for me to see how you can say there's an exaggeration when thousands of people lost their lives on September 11," Mr. Edwards said.

If there is a better argument for keeping Kerry out of the White House, I'd like to hear it. How typically left-wing is it to claim that the Republicans are exaggerating the threat of foreign attack? It takes us back to the Carter presidency, who shifted American foreign policy from Cold War containment to peaceful and friendly coexistence (famously smooching Brezhnev) -- only to see the peaceful and friendly Soviets overrun Afghanistan.

As Edwards reminded the audience, 3,000 dead Americans on 9/11 wasn't the result of exaggerated threats; it was the result of decades-long minimization of the one-sided Islamofascist war on the West in general and the US in particular. Kerry proposes to take us back to the days of minimization, where we close our eyes to the threats and insist that we spend the "peace dividend" on domestic social engineering. That thinking brought us 9/11.

When we looked at the burning and collapsing towers behind the Statue of Liberty, the smoldering wreck of the Pentagon facade, and the pit made by the heroes of Flight 93 when they thwarted the hijackers, didn't we vow to remember? Did we vow to become vigilant and to take action to make sure that such a thing never happened again? Or did we all decide to write it off as "s**t happens" and assume that the UN will protect us from harm? Kerry's message to the world appears to be the latter.

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