Those Democrats sure are a caution.
The President's opponents keep asking whether we're safer now than before 9/11, and they insist, in answer to their own question, that we are not. The President's policies, they proclaim, have made us less safe than we should be. President Bush denies this, of course, and in a speech last week firmly asserted that we are indeed safer than we were prior to the attack on the WTT and Pentagon five years ago.
Now the President's answer notwithstanding, I think the question whether we are safer than before 9/11 is foolish because there's no way it can be answered. No one has stated what the criteria are for assessing whether we're safer, and a person would have to be omniscient in order to know whether, in fact, we are in greater or lesser peril than previously. The most we can say is that as long as there are Islamists out there who wish to kill us we are not safe. Nevertheless, the Democrats adamantly insist we're less safe and the President assures us that we're more safe.
But here's the funny part. Assorted Dems and their media mouthpieces - John Kerry, Harry Reid, and Juan Williams among others - all chimed in over the weekend to accuse the Republicans of spreading "Fear" in their attempt to win the upcoming elections. The Republicans are trying to win in November by scaring the bejabbers out of the ignorant masses by talking about the need to remain steadfast in the war on terror.
This was a very odd thing for them to say. The Dems are ululating over how unsafe we are, and grabbing every passersby by the lapels to press upon them the message that terrorists can too easily strike us again, that our ports are insecure, and so on, while the President replies that, on the contrary, we're safer now than we were in the 1990s. Yet it's the Republicans, the Democrats snif, who are campaigning on "Fear".
That's the sort of droll reasoning that the Democrats evidently hope to bring to both houses of Congress after November's election.
Is it not the Democrats who are not only warning us that Bush hasn't made us safe from terrorism, but also insisting that the world is getting warmer, that we can expect more frequent and more violent hurricanes, that the Republicans want to take away old folks' social security, that Republicans, if they have their way, will cause the deaths of thousands of women by forcing them into back alley abortions, and that Republicans are at any moment going to strip blacks of their civil rights?
This is real fear-mongering, but it's not the Republicans who are engaging in it. You'd think the media would be embarrassed to let it pass, but apparently it takes more than tortured logic to embarrass the media.