Anti-Climacus

LINK: It's not exactly a new point being made, but someone at left2right says something critical about the left which is actually a criticism and not an opportunity to bask in self-righteousness:

"This is true, but it seems to me that this did not convince enough voters who were concerned about domestic security issues so the question is why not. Well, if I were an undecided voter I would be concerned about things like the following. The New York Times asked delegates at the Democratic and Republican convention about which issues they thought were most important. 2% of Democratic delegates said terrorism; 15% of Republican delegates mentioned terrorism. Only 1% said homeland security was important. Michael Moore went around the country proclaiming there was no terrorist threat. Those who attacked the Patriot Act rarely proposed changes which would be more effective in protecting us against domestic attack, as opposed to changes which would protect us against increased governmental surveillance. It wasn’t clear that the Democratic activists or Kerry saw domestic security as a central issue comparable, say, to preserving Social Security or to doing something about the health care mess.

Now it may be that the view that terrorism is not a threat, or it is relatively minor when compared to other threats, is correct. Perhaps we ought to be more worried about a bird-flu pandemic and less worried about another 9/11. If that is the case we ought to be making that argument. But if that view is incorrect, and if the threat of terrorism is a long-range and serious one, then we would be making very different arguments. We would attack the tax cuts for depriving us of funds that ought to be going to the military, or homeland security, or intelligence gathering. We would be arguing for more troops in Afghanistan where the goverment basically rules only Kabul."