Month: October 2004

From last night’s third and final debate in Tempe, Arizona, between Democratic Sen. John Kerry and Republican President George W. Bush, a line uttered by Kerry in response to a question by moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS News about whether homosexuality is a “choice,” or genetically ingrained, or something that one ill-advisedly buys in the check-out line at Target:

“We’re all God’s children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.”

EARLIER: V.P. Candidate John Edwards on the gaygaygay issue
EVEN EARLIER: President George W. Bush on the gaygaygay issue.
Hopefully, the reminder that a cruel and offensively dehumanizing constitutional amendment is at stake puts all this in perspective for Democratic partisans who may have grimaced in awkward discomfort at last night’s utterances by John Kerry, as sampled above.

(both images via AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

Slated to appear on the New York Times’ Corrections page, October 12, 2004:

Because of an editing error, an article in yesterday’s International News section by Terence Neilan about the release of Yaser E. Hamdi, an American citizen who had been held in U.S. prisons for three years without having charges filed against him (until a Supreme Court ruling in June found the detention to be unlawful), “U.S. Returns Detainee to Saudi Arabia After 3 Years“, was both erroneously titled and published too early. The corrected article was slated to run in late January 2005, and should have been titled “U.S. Returns President to Texas After 4 Years”. The Times regrets the error.

We loves us some nuance when it comes to saying whether or not invading Iraq was a good idea. Or maybe just endorsing the resolution approving the matter. Or whatever. We hate nuance.
George W. Bush, October 9, 2004:

“Knowing what I know today, I would have made the same decision. The world is safer with Saddam in a prison cell.”

Dick Cheney, October 7, 2004:

Vice President Dick Cheney asserted in Miami Thursday that the report justifies rather than invalidates Bush’s decision to go to war. It shows that “delay, defer, wasn’t an option,” Cheney told a town-hall style meeting.

John Kerry, August, 2004:

Asked by a reporter, he said he would have voted for the resolution – even in the absence of evidence of weapons of mass destruction – before adding his usual explanation that he would have subsequently handled everything leading up to the war differently.

John Edwards, October 8, 2004:

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards said last week’s Central Intelligence Agency report confirming the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq hasn’t convinced him it was a mistake to authorize President George W. Bush to take military action.
“The vote on the resolution was the right vote, even in hindsight,” Edwards, a first-term U.S. senator from North Carolina, said in an interview aboard his campaign plane on Oct. 8. “It was the right vote to give the president the authority to confront Saddam Hussein,” he said. “That’s what would have given the president the power that would have allowed the weapons inspectors back into Iraq.”

RELATED: Cobb/LaMarche 2004, “Vote Green for Peace”