NBC's Gregory allowed Kerrey to falsely characterize Edwards' speech
SUMMARY: In a report on Today, David Gregory allowed former Sen. Bob Kerrey to suggest that John Edwards' recent speech questioning the use of the phrase "war on terror" had ignored the threat of terrorism or spoken against fighting terrorism. In fact, Edwards' speech identified several situations in which "force is justified."
On the May 24 edition of NBC's Today, NBC News chief White House correspondent David Gregory reported that in a May 23 speech, former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) "question[ed] whether there is a war on terror at all." Gregory aired a clip of Edwards saying during the speech, "The war on terror is a slogan designed only for politics. It is not a strategy to make America safe. It's a bumper sticker, not a plan." Gregory went on to report that former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE) "insists it is dangerous to allow the political fight over Iraq to undermine America's resolve in fighting global terrorism." A video clip then showed Kerrey saying of terrorist organizations, "They are real, they are out there, they're improving the quality of their tactics, and ... we're going to have to address the questions of what do we do about them." But contrary to Kerrey's false suggestion -- aired uncritically by Gregory -- that Edwards denied the threat of terrorism or spoke against fighting terrorism, Edwards did "address the questions of what do we do about" terrorism in the speech. Edwards spoke about "times when force is justified: to protect our vital national interests ... to respond to acts of aggression by other nations and non-state actors ... to protect treaty allies and alliance commitments ... to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons ... and to prevent or stop genocide." [Ellipses in original.]
In contrast with Gregory's treatment of Edwards' speech, a May 23 Associated Press article reported that Edwards "outlined several steps he said he would pursue as president to strengthen the military, including using force only to pursue essential national security missions, improve civilian-military relations, and root out mismanagement at the Pentagon."
From the prepared text of Edwards' May 23 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City:
The question is, what should replace the war on terror? Since the end of the Cold War, folks here at CFR and elsewhere have been engaged in an effort to be the next George Kennan and define the era. As all of you know, we need a new strategy for rebuilding a strong military for a new century.
Any new strategy must include new preventive measures to win the long-term struggle and fuel hope and opportunity. This includes strong and creative diplomacy, and also new efforts to lead the fight against global poverty. I've proposed a plan to lead an international effort to educate every child in the world. As president, I would increase foreign assistance by $5 billion a year to make millions of people safer, healthier, and more democratic, and by creating a cabinet-level post to lead this effort.
Any new strategy must improve how we gather intelligence. From my years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, I know how difficult this can be. We must always seek to protect our national security by aggressively gathering intelligence in accordance with proven methods.
Yet we cannot do so by abandoning human rights and the rule of law. As two former generals recently wrote in the Washington Post, "If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable ... we drive ... undecideds into the arms of the enemy." And we must avoid actions that will give terrorists or even other nations an excuse to abandon international law. As president, I will close Guantanamo Bay, restore habeas corpus, and ban torture. Measures like these will help America once again achieve its historic moral stature -- and lead the world toward democracy and peace.
And finally, a new strategy must have a clear idea of how to rebuild the U.S. military.
[...]
First, we must clarify the mission of a post-Bush, post-9/11, post-Iraq American military for the 21st century.
We must be clear about when it is appropriate for a commander-in-chief to use force. As president, I will only use offensive force after all other options including diplomacy have been exhausted, and after we have made efforts to bring as many countries as possible to our side. However, there are times when force is justified: to protect our vital national interests ... to respond to acts of aggression by other nations and non-state actors ... to protect treaty allies and alliance commitments ... to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons ... and to prevent or stop genocide.
Yet we must remember the complementary relationship between military force and diplomacy. Too often during the past six years, this Administration's diplomatic efforts have left the U.S. with two unacceptable options: do nothing or use force. We must do better than that. We should always seek to solve problems peacefully, preferably working with others. Yet one of the oldest rules of statecraft is that diplomacy is most effective when backed by a strong military. That does not mean, however, that every problem needs a military answer; far from it.
From the May 24 edition of NBC's Today:
GREGORY: One contender for the White House now questions whether there is a war on terror at all.
EDWARDS: The war on terror is a slogan designed only for politics. It is not a strategy to make America safe. It's a bumper sticker, not a plan.
GREGORY: But former Senator Kerrey insists it is dangerous to allow the political fight over Iraq to undermine America's resolve in fighting global terrorism, even after Bush leaves office.
KERREY: We are the number one target of these terrorist organizations. They are real, they are out there, they're improving the quality of their tactics, and we're going to have to -- we're going to have to address the questions of what do we do about them.
God, Illya Kuryakin is looking his age!
So it's now conservative misinformation to give a Democrat the chance to respond to another Democrat? And you guys really say that this isn't a far left web site? Edwards gave his opinion about terrorism and Kerrey responded to his claims. It wasn't even a debate between a Republican and a Democrat. It was a debate between a staunchly liberal Democrat and a slightly more moderate Democrat. But Kerrey was right to blast Edwards for refusing to admit that there is a War on Terror. It scares me that Edwards could become President. Edwards would appease our enemies and have a much weaker national security.
The war frame itself is a dishonest conservative fabrication, it limits understanding of terrorism and hence the ability to work creatively to neutralize terror cells.
But the best part of Edwards' proposal is his affirmation of human rights and rule of law.
"The war frame itself is a dishonest conservative fabrication"
Conservative fabrication? So is Kerrey a conservative? Is Lieberman a conservative? What about Hillary? She uses the phrase as well. Are they all conservatives?
Doesn't make a difference. Those folks self identify as Democrats.
It's (GWOT) a conservative framing of the issue, just because Democrats use the phrase doesn't legitimize the term or make it more workable.
Giulliani believes in a woman's right to chose and gay rights. He also uses the terror frame. Is he a Liberal?
Giuliani is liberal on social issues and conservative on economic issues and national security issues. I would say that he's a moderate overall.
Well then, Kerrey, Lieberman and Hillary are moderates by that estimtion. They are foreign policy conservatives and social liberals.
None of that gives truth to the war frame.
I'll give you that Kerrey and Lieberman could be considered moderates, but not Hillary. She's now strongly against the Iraq War, and Bill Clinton was pretty liberal on foreign policy and national security issues as well. Hillary's initial support of the war was simply an attempt by her to move to the middle. But after the war became unpopular she jumped ship and started opposing the war.
Rino, just curious- what do you consider Clinton's liberal approach to foreign policy and national security?
And it doesn't seem to have been distinctly pointed out, but Edwards' remark seems to be clearly directed at the slogan, not the troops or the real problem of terrorism.
Big deal. So Hillary doesn't support the Administration's handling of this occupation, er...war. In no way does this mean she disbelieves blunt military force can defeat terrorism. She still buys into the GWOT frame. She still holds a conservative national security stance.
And still, this is no indication that the war frame is anything but a conservative fabrication.
Hillary has NEVER been a liberal. That has always been one of my problems with her she has ALWAYS been too conservative for me. This move to the center mantra you rightwingers chant is another delusional fantasy. It needs to be true for propaganda purposes so you consider it true for that reason alone and if the facts show otherwise too bad for the facts. Things do not become true because you speak them. Hillary is fairly moderate she always has been.
rino, edwards did not say a thing about appeasing our enemies. more made up nonsense.
This is just amazing! Is there no reading comprehension at all? Does the thickness of your skull match its size? Is it really so much easier just to take a baseless talking point than to examine in detail? Is that a rhetorical question? Wake the hell up! I'm sorry, but the world is just not a simple place with simple answers.
Its not the kind of thing that can be fought as a war. It's as crazy as fighting a war on drugs. Oh wait, we do that too.
Does anyone here notice the right's constant use of the term "war on terror?" Isn't what we should actually be fighting against and helping protect our citizens from "terrorists" or "terrorism?" If you use the literal definition of the actual word terror, there is no entity on earth who terrifies more of the inhabitants of the planet than BushCo's regime, and their insane, simplistic drive in answering every perceived threat to America and its allies (the few we have left) by using military force and extreme violence, regardless of whether it is appropriate or not. If the Clinton administration had used diplomacy in Iraq instead of continuing the bombings and economic sanctions which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children, perhaps the radical elements of Islam would not have been so successful in their recruitment of people willing to die fighting rather than starving. Then Sadam and Osama, who obviously hated each other and held opposing philosophies on just about everything except hating the US, would not have had the cojones to believe they could actually challenge the will of the rest of the civilized world. It is not terror we need to fight; it is the terrorists themselves and the irrational violence they are willing to perpetrate against any and all civilizations.
I am not surprised at this. While Edwards shows a desired drive for power he does not show the all important necessary greed for ever increasing wealth that is critical for corporate globalists and their placed politicians to have any degree of comfort with him ever getting close to the office of president.
While not literally Swift Boating, it is still very much the same thing the media is doing again. A tiny truth mixed with a great lie and much talk as if to help viewers to understand the tiny truth when all that is repeated over and over is the great lie.
It is far past spin.
Edwards is correct, of course, but that won't stop the Troglodytes from lying through their teeth. It's a shame that some Democrats have been so blinded by the Right's rhetoric of fear that they can't, or won't see the truth.
"War on Terror" is the fabrication of the NeoClown usurpers who have taken over our government. They use it as an excuse to grab more and more power for the executive branch and more profits for their corporate masters.
The threat of terrorism is real, but the way to fight it is with international cooperation of law enforcement, intelligence, and special forces....not tanks and battleships. Unfortunately, there's more profit in selling tanks and battleships to the Pentagon.
I can tell you're a libral Nerzog because you make sense and know what you're talking about from an informed point of view. Another thing we have to do is remove or at least minimize any incentive to create more terrorists. There will always be people who hate us or anybody for that matter, but there's a lot of things we can do in the world to reduce the hatred.
The way to fight terrorism is through serious and aggressive methods, all methods. Not spending time saying this is not technically a war on terror, or some such semantic, parsing stump speeches from Edwards.
Thats the point. It needs to be fought on many fronts. We will never bomb our way out of terrorism. The military is only ONE component of fighting terrorism but as long as we keep seeing it as a war and talking about it that way we keep limiting our engagement TO that simplistic approach. Its time to move past that to fighting terrorism on many fronts, intelligence, diplomacy (we need treaties with many countries that allow us to cross national boundries to ferret out terrorist bases for instance or to allow international intelligence groups to operate in many countries) and thats just the begining. The military is a broadsword not a scalpel, it can cut off a limb but it cant get at the metastasizing tumors. THIS is a good reason to re evaluate the term and see if its doing us more harm than good.
Disagreements over tactics and strategy is a very worthwhile and substantive debate to have, it should be encouraged. But to say, for pure political one-upmanship and to grab a headline as Edwards is doing with this little ploy, is counterproductive and I agree with Bush, naive.
We are in a war on terror, a war against Islamic radicals throughout the world.....there is no point to minimize it, or ratchet up the fear, either. But to parse words and say war on terror is incorrect is just transparent campaign rhetoric from a stagnant presidential campaign.
The war frame is more than semantics. On an elemental neurologic level frames alter and constrain perceptions of how a problem can be approached and solved. That is the dishonesty of the war frame, it panders directly to the conservative worldview of direct causation and punishment thereby limiting debate of potentially effective alternative approaches to neutralizing terrorism.
A war has a concrete enemy, an opposing army, territory or resources to capture, and surrender, defeat or victory to claim. Radical ideology has no such related characteristics to traditional constructs of the definition of war. War is therefore a metaphorical limiting re-agent, or at best a non-reactive element, in a chemical equation called terrorism.
Words have meaning and consequence. Words free or constrain our ability to process critical information.
Semantics ideed!
he's saying bush has reduced it to a slogan, with which bush justifies everything he does. edwards is saying it's a little more complex.
Edwards knew exactly how his comments would be viewed, he knew very well that their complexities would be lost in this soundbite era....he isn't that stupid. He wanted to insert himself for relevancy as he is battling Hillary and Obama everyday......he needs to shake things up and he is looking everyday for ways to do it.
how his comments are "viewed" is just spin. you don't really have to read too far into his comment to see he's saying, that for bush, the slogan has replaced the strategy.
Spin that John Edwards very artfully intended. Don't be so naive. Edwards is appealing to his hard anti war base, and this headline is exactly what they want to hear, and he knows it. He is trying to solidify his stature where they are concerned as that is his best hope in the primaries, if he hopes to get any traction against the frontrunners.
Politicians are far too calculating and cagey to say this, and then be surprised or outraged because they were taken out of context or the entire speech was spun incorrectly.......come on, they know the consequences of their every move.
you're offering nothing but your spin on his remarks. i'm pointing out what he actually said.
You missed the entire point of this thread and the larger point I was making. Never mind.
i very clearly get your "larger point". i happen to disagree. is that ok?
That is just fine, thanks for clarifying.
"Edwards is appealing to his hard anti war base, and this headline is exactly what they want to hear, and he knows it." Tommy
Edwards is appealing to the reality based community.