Better Red Than Dead
(Ed. note: isn't it ironic that the Republican party, once known for using the "red menace" of communism as the central pillar in its political platform, is now associated with that same color, thanks to news organizations use of a colored map to denote wins for the two parties? Doncha think? It's like rai-eee-ain on a summers day...)

Much has been made about Dick Cheney's campaign rhetoric earlier this week ("Vote red or your dead"... or something like that). Though the statement hasn't been retracted by Dick, his aides have sought to "clarify" what the statement really meant, that voting for Kerry/Edwards would turn us back to the dark ages where America fought terrorism via law enforcement and judiciary means. Salon's War Room has an answer for that:

Further, it's amazing that Bush is even claiming credit for the capture and killing of al-Qaida members and associates. The Bush campaign has ridiculed John Kerry for suggesting that law enforcement and intelligence-gathering play a central role in combatting terrorism -- Kerry doesn't understand, the GOP says, that this is war and requires the full force of the U.S. military. But as Knight-Ridder pointed out, law enforcement and intelligence-gathering have achieved whatever success there has been so far in the global round-up of terrorist suspects. Military actions have had little effect. "While the war began with U.S. troops and their Afghan allies ousting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001, much of al-Qaida's leadership escaped that onslaught to Pakistan. Since then, the counterterrorism successes largely have been the result of multinational cooperation from police and intelligence services," Knight-Ridder wrote.

Add this to the pile of reasons America should question Bush's leadership in fighting terrorism.

That same War Room post also reminds us about about Bush's assertion that the U.S. has eliminated three-quarters of Al Qaeda's membership or associates. Where does this figure come from? Newsweek wonders as well:

In his nationally televised speech to the convention last Thursday night,  Bush for the first time claimed that “more than three quarters of Al Qaeda’s key members and associates have been detained or killed.”

For the past year, the president and senior administration officials have repeatedly used a lower figure to measure the U.S. government’s progress in the war on terror. Bush in his State of the Union speech last January asserted that “nearly two thirds” of Al Qaeda’s “known leaders” had been captured or killed.

Pressed to explain how and when the estimate went up, a White House official told NEWSWEEK that the revised figure was based on a new CIA analysis that had been repeatedly sought by the White House in recent months and was provided to presidential aides only on Sept. 1, the day before Bush addressed the convention.

[...]

An official with the recently disbanded 9/11 commission  also dismissed the new number, noting that it was impossible to get a firm handle on precisely the number of Al Qaeda “leaders” that were in place at the time of the September 11 attacks—the definition that the CIA says it used as its baseline for the estimate.

“It was meaningless when they said two thirds and it’s meaningless when they said three fourths,” said the official, who asked not to be identified.  “This sounds like it was pulled out of somebody’s orifice.”