LA Times agrees with Sister Toldjah

…. er, or something like that You’ll understand when you read the following:

In Defense of Dick Cheney
We rise, unaccustomed, in defense of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney told a campaign-trail audience Tuesday that if the Democrats win the White House, “the danger is we’ll get hit again” by terrorists. A vote for John Kerry, in other words, is a vote for more terrorism.

Nasty, to be sure. But in a campaign where charges and countercharges (mainly, in our view, those coming from the Republican side) are surging way past the merely nasty to the utterly vile and brazenly dishonest, making distinctions is important.

The war on terrorism is the central issue in the campaign, and both parties’ candidates have various points to make about it. But the issue boils down to one question: Which candidate would do the best job, as president, of making sure that we don’t “get hit again.” That is what people really care about.

Sens. Kerry and John Edwards have been criticizing President Bush’s performance on terrorism since 9/11 and promising to do a better job at it if given the chance. In doing so, they surely mean to suggest that the risk of another terrorist attack will be greater if Bush and Cheney win the election. A vote for George W. Bush, in other words, is a vote for more terrorism. Or if Kerry and Edwards don’t mean that, it’s hard to know what they do mean.

Julian Sanchez at Reason.com follows a similar thought process:

Much as it pains me to defend Dick Cheney, it seems to me as though his alleged “scare tactics” vis a vis the threat of terror if we make the “wrong choice” on Election Day rest on a straightforward misreading of his statement. *snip*

Most of the reports either omit the rest of the quotation entirely, or append it elsewhere, as though they weren’t part of one long, multi-clause sentence. As I read this, he’s not saying the danger is that if we elect Kerry, then the danger is that we’ll be attacked. He’s saying that if we elect Kerry and we’re attacked, then the danger is that we’ll treat it as a criminal act rather than an act of war. And in context, it’s actually pretty transparent that this is what Cheney intended. So transparent once you look at the full transcript, in fact, that I wonder whether some of the misreading isn’t deliberate, either as a partisan tactic or an attempt to generate a news story.

IOW, the Dems and their waterboys in the media are trumping up this story for no real reason outside of pure politics – and demagoguery.