John Cole takes Richard Cohen to task for sloppy writing and for letting his big ugly bias hang out in front of the children.
This, in turn, is related to Reverend Sensing's take on Bush's supposed comment that [ready the Media Glee Machine!] We Can't Win The War On Terror. Gasp!
The good Reverend, of course, has got the actual quote, as opposed to the soundbite that Big Media Inc. tossed back and forth among themselves like a bloody scrap of mouse among a passel of housecats, and he writes:
Obviously, not sound-snipping the answer reveals that what Bush said was in fact thoughtful, probing and well considered. He just blew the first sentence in a political sense. This is a war of a highly unconventional nature. Only two weeks after 9/11's attacks I wrote,This war will not have a clear ending in either time or space. There will be no surrender ceremony of abject capitulation by the enemy. Victory, whatever that word will actually indicate, will be neither final nor obvious. To the question, "How will we know we've won?" the answer is, "We won't."To buttress my point, and the president's let's change the question:
Q: Do you really think we can win the fight against crime in the next four years?
Would you not think it either arrogant or stupid for a president to answer, "Absolutely, and by the end of my second term there will be no more crime"?
The Administration could have avoided giving the media and its other opponents such ammunition if they had properly named our enemy and declared war on Islamofascism, or some less syllabic equivalent, instead of on Islamofascism's tactics.
The whole domestic "War on [insert social ill here]" concept is ridiculous to begin with, and now they've used that nomenclature to package an actual war, which is downright foolish. It's lowered this conflict to the level of the ineffective War on Drugs, matched it with the abstract War on Crime, and declared it as winnable as the eternal War on Poverty.
This terminology is a reflection of one of two things: the actual dim-wittedness of the American people, or the Government's assumption of the dim-wittedness of the American people. I favor the latter but am of late increasingly reluctant to completely dismiss the former.
