Cheney links Kerry win to possible attacks

The presidential campaign spiked to a new level of rhetorical heat Tuesday when Vice President Cheney warned that a vote for Democrat John Kerry could bring terrorist attacks on the United States.
Speaking to supporters in Des Moines, Cheney called it “absolutely essential” that on Election Day voters “make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating.”
The vice president’s aides later said he was referring to the terrorist threat that will face any administration elected in November.
Cheney’s remarks overshadowed accusatory exchanges by Kerry and President Bush over Iraq and drew a response from North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Kerry’s running mate.
“Dick Cheney’s scare tactics crossed the line today,” he said. Protecting America from “vicious terrorists” is not a partisan issue, and Cheney and Bush ought to know that, Edwards said.
Cheney said the nation under a Kerry presidency could “fall back into a pre-9/11 mind-set,” which he described as viewing terrorist attacks as “just criminal acts” and the nation as “not really at war.”
Kerry, a fourth-term Massachusetts senator, Vietnam combat veteran and former prosecutor, often says America is at war and maintains he could fight a more effective war on terrorism than Bush. Today, he planned to spotlight what he calls Bush’s wrong decisions on Iraq with a speech at the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal, the same place Bush made the case for war in October 2002.
At the time, Bush argued that Saddam Hussein had to be ousted because he was “harboring terrorists” and possessed weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons have not been found. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission found no cooperative relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda.
“The truth is, there are terrorists there that were not there before we went in” to Iraq, Kerry said Tuesday at a town meeting in Greensboro, N.C. But Bush, campaigning in Lee’s Summit, Mo., said “we were right to make America safer by removing Saddam Hussein from power.”
Even as Bush and Kerry visit battleground states and express concern about voters without jobs or health care, the Iraq war remains at the forefront. Voters ask about it, and the candidates use it against each other: Bush to cast doubt on Kerry’s consistency, Kerry to cast doubt on Bush’s judgment.
In Lee’s Summit, the president drew chuckles from a crowd of 5,000 when he said that Kerry “woke up yesterday morning with yet another new position, and this one is not even his own. It is that of his onetime rival Howard Dean.”
The president said Kerry “even used the same words Howard Dean used back when he supposedly disagreed with him.” Bush said invading Iraq was the right thing to do “no matter how many times Sen. Kerry flip-flops.”
Kerry said this week that Iraq is “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Dean made a similar remark in February 2003, a month before the invasion.