Thomas Friedman, tanned and rested, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/opinion/14friedman.html?oref=login dreams of going back to 9/10. He thinks Bush is wrong to slam Kerry’s hope, expressed in the Sunday Times, that we can get back to a place where “terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.”
Excuse me, I don’t know about you, but I dream of going back to the days when terrorism was just a nuisance in our lives. . .
I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us.
I don’t know about you, but I dream of going back to the days when I could get to the airport 20 minutes before flight time, when security checks were a minor nuisance.
But it’s not going to happen, and I do not want a Head of Airport Security who dreams of it.
Max Boot, writing in today’s Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-boot14oct14,1,1286103.column?coll=la-home-utilities notes that Kerry’s dreams of 9/10 are the defining issue in this election:
[Bush] believes it is vital to wage war on state sponsors of terror and to spread freedom in order to dry up the ideological cesspools that breed terrorism.
Kerry disagrees. “You can’t impose it on people,” he says of democracy, ignoring our success in doing just that in Afghanistan.
Although he is disdainful of democracy promotion, Kerry has a soft spot in his heart for diplomatic niceties. . . . And he would appoint “a top-level envoy to restart the Middle East peace process” despite the collapse of this approach four years ago.
Kerry is offering Clinton redux. This focus on diplomacy and law enforcement, on treating Al Qaeda as if it were the Medellin drug cartel, may have been a plausible posture in the 1990s, when terrorism appeared to be a low-level nuisance. But 9/11 changed everything. . .
Bush gets it; he was transformed by 9/11. . . . [Kerry] told the Times that the attacks on America “didn’t change me much at all.”
Stem cell research, gay rights, women’s choice are all important issues, but they will not be fundamentally affected by this election. Whether we elect a 9/10 or a 9/12 president will be a turning point in history.