Voters left to their own instincts doubtless can figure out whether they'll be safer with Kerry or President George W. Bush - a recent poll shows Bush favored two-to-one on this issue - but getting their information straight from the horse's mouth might be more helpful to that process than relying on some news sources.
Herewith, spin- and vermin-free, is what Cheney said in the context of other critical wartime decisions throughout U.S. history:
". Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us."
We might agree that Cheney's comment is breathtakingly Byzantine, but his meaning seems clear: If we get hit again (during a Kerry presidency), the danger is we'll treat such an attack as a criminal act rather than as an act of war, which in Cheney's view would be a mistake.
Yet many accounts ended Cheney's comment with a period after "we'll get hit again," implying a cause-and-effect that doesn't hold up in the context of the rest of the sentence.
No one knows how a President Kerry might react to a terrorist attack, but we do know that Kerry and Bush differ philosophically in their approaches to the war on terror. We also can surmise that Cheney believes anything other than a war attitude before, during and after any terrorist attack is a mistake that endangers national security.
Why his plainly saying so is controversial is curious when, really, nothing else matters as much as which candidate most likely will prevent future terrorist assaults.
In cutting through all the verbiage, it may be helpful to consider on the three-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that there have been no new terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since Bush declared war on terror. Whether this is a function of luck or improved dot-connecting, we may never know, but what ain't broke is often best left unfixed.