McQ, at Q and O, takes offense at a quote from an interview with President Bush in the Wall Street Journal:
“And I think most Americans understand we’re vulnerable. But my hope was after 9/11, most Americans wouldn’t walk around saying, ‘My goodness, we’re at war. Therefore let us don’t live a normal life. Let us don’t invest.’ ” Mr. Bush calls it an “interesting contradiction” that he wants “people to understand the stakes of failure” in this conflict. But on the other hand, he also wants “the country to be able to grow, invest, save, expand, educate, raise their children.” This is another way of saying how hard it is for a democracy to maintain support for a war without a tangible, ominous enemy such as the Soviet Union or Imperial Japan.
The emphasized bit above is the bit that McQ emphasized in his post. He included the entire quote, but you’ll notice that he only highlighted the first bit of it, and then proceeds to act as though the last half never existed. When people in his comments called him out for doing that, he immediately defends himself by saying that the entire quote is there, and that his analysis is correct — President Bush doesn’t want want people to think we are at war.
I’m reminded of a quote from Xrlq’s sidebar. Xrlq quotes Glenn Reynolds as saying, “I… live in my mom’s basement.” The quote is accompanied by a link to the original quote (here), which reads, in its entirity, “I don’t live in my mom’s basement, either”.
The difference here, of course, is that Xrlq’s sidebar quote is (I assume) intended as a joke, whereas McQ (a blogger who I usually hold in very high regard) seems to think that chopping up Bush’s quote and claiming he said something very different from what he actually said is completely fair.
Imagine a Christian leader (we’ll call him “Reverend Doe”) who said, “God doesn’t want His people to say, ‘Adultery is evil, therefore Let us shun every man who even so much as looks at a woman who is not his wife in lust. Let us never forgive him.’” Imagine that the remainder of his speech was filled with all the reasons why we should remember that Christians are not perfect, but that we are forgiven, and therefore we should be forgiving of others who commit sins. Now, imagine that someone else comes up to you and says “Rev. Doe said that we shouldn’t say adultery is evil.” In context, it’s absolutely ludicrous to claim that Rev. Doe said that, yet that’s exactly what McQ is trying to do.
What makes it worse is that the point that McQ makes a good point in the comments:
Maybe its just me Mark, but I don’t want citizens walking away from the twin towers collapsing, the Pentagon getting hit and citizens causing a plane to crash before it could hit the White House and saying, “Nah, we’re not at war. No biggie. Everything is normal.”
That’s why this is all fading after 5 years for heaven sake. We’re no longer mad, we no longer want these pieces of crap dead, stomped on and burned to a cinder. We should still be fighting mad.
Instead we want to pretend everything is normal and peachy keen. Then he wonders why he gets so much static about FISA and Guantanemo, etc and why everything is so polarized.
That isn’t mutually exclusive with anything Bush said in that interview, though, as end of the paragraph quoted above shows (emphasis mine):
Mr. Bush calls it an “interesting contradiction” that he wants “people to understand the stakes of failure” in this conflict. But on the other hand, he also wants “the country to be able to grow, invest, save, expand, educate, raise their children.” This is another way of saying how hard it is for a democracy to maintain support for a war without a tangible, ominous enemy such as the Soviet Union or Imperial Japan.
Not wanting the country to devolve into a nation of citizens who’re too afraid of terrorists to do anything isn’t the same as a desire to see us bury our heads in the sand in an attempt to go back to 9/10/2001.