rove's revisions

karl rove's speech, wednesday in houston, made a couple points that need a closer look.

near the start he listed terrorist attacks on american targets from 1983 thru 2000 and said that only after 9/11 did americans realize they were making war on us—apparently only because g w bush made the "hard choice" of telling us so, because he took the "long view."

in actual fact, folk who pay attention to world events already knew terrorists considered themselves to be at war with us. the issue was whether we should deal with it as war or crime.

prior administrations took into account that terrorists like to think of themselves as warriors and to project that image to their target audience. "warrior" is only a short step from "hero." to call it war is to elevate their status from criminals to warriors and thus—in a sense—legitimize their actions.

for that reason, earlier governments—both ours and other nations'—decided to follow the law enforcement model rather than the military model.

after 9/11, we needed to go all out against terrorists and bring them to justice, but "war on terror" should've been said metaphorically, like "war on crime" or "war on poverty."

later in the speech rove spoke of meeting with bernie kerik, who told him of videotapes he'd seen in baghdad documenting torture carried out by the ousted regime.

rove segued to "we mustn't wait for them to attack us again."

it was a complete non sequitur, but nobody seemed to notice.

i guess a lot of folk still haven't gotten past the osaddama bin laden hussein merger so successfully foisted on us 3 or 4 years ago, and rove knows it.