Sounds like Dean is lying this time:
"I never said Saddam was a danger to the United States, ever," he added.
The Kerry camp seized on this statement, circulating a memo citing Dr. Dean's remarks on the CBS program "Face the Nation" in September 2002: "There's no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States and to our allies."
Dr. Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, dismissed the issue as semantic. "I know for absolute fact that he has never said Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat," he said. "There's a difference between imminent threat and threat."
Vaguely reminiscent of the debate over what "sexual relations" means. It's not the semantically dissected wording that matters - it's the message he was conveying at the time. If an objective listener reasonably concludes that Dean was agreeing with the political consensus at the time that Saddam was a threat, then leaving out the word "imminent" doesn't change a thing. And adding it now doesn't either. Same as when most Americans reasonably concluded that Clinton meant he had not engaged in sexual activities of any kind with "that woman", not just intercourse. The fact that, according to Webster's, he didn't lie is irrelevant.
OTOH, I'd add that one would also need to look at the context of Dean's statement. If he said something else to indicate he was distinguishing between threat and imminent threat at the time he said this, then that does change things. But if that were the case, I'm sure his campaign manager would have taken a different tack in his response.
Of course, Kerry is deliberately misleading people, too, by arguing that his "yes" vote last fall wasn't "really" a yes vote. So they're both liars. I'm shocked! ;-) |
