I love that bit in every debate where John Kerry pledges to "hunt down and kill the terrorists.'' You can see him thinking, ''Must remember to say 'kill' very loudly and in a deep voice. And sound as if I'm not gonna be some pantywaist president who uses special forces or unmanned drones. I'm gonna kill -- sorry, KILL -- 'em myself.'' This is to dispel suspicions that in reality he'd hunt down the terrorists and serve them with a subpoena, possibly from one of the less robust judicial systems, such as The Hague or Massachusetts, and possibly for mail fraud, if the whole mass murder thing looks like it won't stick.
But it's exhausting having to remember when to spit out the tough talk, and so your concentration wanders, and you get relaxed, and then you say things like this to the New York Times: ''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance. As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise.''
So the senator has now made what was hitherto just a cheap crack from his opponents into formal policy: The Democrats are the Sept. 10 party. The ''I'll hunt down and kill America's enemies'' line was written for him and planted on his lips. The ''It's just a nuisance like prostitution'' line is his, and how he really thinks of the issue. What an odd analogy. Your average jihadist won't take kindly to having his martyrdom operation compared with the decadent infidels' sex industry, but the rest of us shouldn't be that happy about it either. Kerry is correct in the sense that even if you dispatched every constable in the land to crack down on prostitution there'd still be some pox-ridden whore somewhere touting for business. But, on the other hand, applying the Kerry prostitute approach to terrorists would seem to leave rather a lot of them in place. In Boston, where he served as a ''law enforcement person,'' the Yellow Pages are full of lavish display ads for not-all-that-euphemistic ''escort services.'' In other words, while you can make an argument for a ''managerial'' approach to terrorism, the analogy with prostitution sounds more like an undeclared surrender. This is aside from the basic defect of the argument: If some gal in your building is working as a prostitute, that's a nuisance -- condoms in the elevator, johns in the lobby; if Islamists seize the schoolhouse and kill your kids, even if it only happens once every couple of years, ''nuisance'' doesn't quite cover it. |