kufyit wrote:What Cheney said was, editing or not:
1. If we make the wrong choice..." That wrong choice would be electing anyone except for George Bush;
2. then "the danger is that we'll get hit again..."
3.
AND we respond in the pre-9/11 mindset of law enforcement.
4.
THAT (falling back into the pre-9/11 mindset) would be a terrible mistake.
When you break his quote in the middle and stick a period there, yeah, it makes sense -- but it's not what he said. There's not a break there.
There's another reason why this reading makes sense: one of the GOP talking points is that Kerry still treats terrorism as a law-enforcement matter. It makes sense that Cheney would be trying to hammer home "it would be a mistake to elect Kerry, because he thinks terrorism is a law-enforcement matter." It doesn't make sense for Cheney to say "it would be a mistake to elect Kerry, because it would increase terrorism" -- I'm pretty sure he's smart enough to know he'd get the sort of response you posted from most swing voters.
This reading certainly isn't a
run-on sentence. It's long, but it's a single complete idea and it's joined properly.
I feel that this is nothing more than clever diction on the part of the speechwriters. That first if->then statement is a complete sentence.
That may be true -- it might be both clever diction on the part of the speechwriters, and clever editing on the part of the newswriters. But it seems pretty clear to me that the insertion of "Cheney said" is very misleading -- it forces you into the reading you had, instead of what I think is far more natural. I'd be interested to see how it would be read by people who didn't see the CNN article, and just read the full quote.
If you read the rest of your CNN article -- which I did this morning -- it seems Cheney's spokespeople are saying the same thing:
Anne Womack, Cheney's spokeswoman, wrote:"Whoever is elected in November faces the prospect of another terrorist attack. The question is whether or not we have the right policies in place to best protect our country. That's what the vice president said."
...
"If you take the whole quote, the vice president stands by his statement. But if you just take a chunk, that's not what he meant."
That seems exactly like what I'm saying -- it looks like the article split the quote in half. If you take just a chunk, you get the wrong meaning.
I highly doubt that this was the way in which it was said.
It would be nice if we had footage, wouldn't it? Then we could be sure. I can't find any, but typing whitehouse.gov and clicking on "Vice President" led me to the
transcript of the speech. And it looks like we can determine the meaning simply from the context. To view the quote in proper context, you have to start with the line "But good defense is not enough" and read the next 16 paragraphs. That's a lot of reading, so I'm going to summarize. Even the summary will be long, so I'll post a hyper-short summary at the end.
Summary wrote:
We have to go on the offense -- not just try to prevent terror attacks, because you can never be 100% successful on defense, but also go after terrorists where they train and going after nations that harbor them. We went into Afghanistan and Iraq and shut down regimes that sponsor terror. "The ultimate solution isn't just to kill terrorists [but instead] to make certain that we change the circumstances [in Iraq and Afghanistan] so they never again become breeding grounds for the terrorists." This isn't just a US problem, but a worldwide problem.
The upcoming decision is important, because there's a big difference in the way Kerry would respond to attacks and the way we currently do. We thank Kerry for his Vietnam service, but we question the way he acted in the Senate. We have to look at Kerry's record. He voted against the same systems as Cheney did -- but he voted against them in '84 during the Cold War, while Cheney cancelled them in '89 to '93 after the cold war was over. Kerry voted against Desert Storm. Kerry voted for Gulf War II but against funding the troops.
"I don't believe he has demonstrated the kind of commitment and capability and philosophy and world view... to successfully defend the United States against the kind of threat we're faced with today" (NOTE: he's not saying Kerry doesn't want to defend the US -- just that he wouldn't be successful at it.) Kerry would use military force in response to attacks, but we need to make a decision to go after the attackers before they launch, to get rid of terrorist breeding grounds -- we've already been attacked, and now we need to stay on offense. That means on Nov 2 we have to make the right decision for president, because the danger is... the thing this whole thread is about. But we have to understand we're at war.
So the entire context here is in talking about responding differently to terrorism.
The entire context is about viewing it as a war, going on the offensive against terrorists and taking out terrorist camps and terrorist-sponsoring regimes, using the military to take out terrorists. Viewed within this context, kufyit's reading doesn't really fit, but mine does. Within this context, it's clear that the danger Cheney is pointing to is not that Kerry will invite more attacks, but that he'll respond to attacks ineffectively. Cheney is saying the problem is that Kerry will stay on defense, but we need to go on offense.
