For the past two days, most of the cable news networks have been playing up President Bush’s retorts to Senator Kerry’s remarks about terrorism. Here is the original quote from CNN:
”We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” the article states as the Massachusetts senator’s reply.
”As a former law enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”
Kerry was a prosecutor before he got into politics, and made fighting organized crime a priority.
Bush campaign Chairman Marc Racicot, in an appearance on CNN’s “Late Edition,” interpreted Kerry’s remarks as saying “that the war on terrorism is like a nuisance. He equated it to prostitution and gambling, a nuisance activity. You know, quite frankly, I just don’t think he has the right view of the world. It’s a pre-9/11 view of the world.”
Republican Party Chairman Ed Gillespie, on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” used similar language.
“Terrorism is not a law enforcement matter, as John Kerry repeatedly says. Terrorist activities are not like gambling. Terrorist activities are not like prostitution. And this demonstrates a disconcerting pre-September 11 mindset that will not make our country safer. And that is what we see relative to winning the war on terror and relative to Iraq.”
I saw Bush’s speech this morning where he said that terrorism was “not a nuisance, like gambling and prostitution.” It felt great to have the President of the United States refer to the topic of my intellectual interest as a “nuisance.” I can only imagine what Frank Fahrenkopf’s going through at the American Gaming Association.
In all fairness, Kerry did call illegal gambling a nuisance, but that nuance has been lost on most of the news people.
In all honesty, I’m surprised that the AGA hasn’t issued any kind of statement objecting to either Kerry’s remarks or the Bush camp’s spin.
Since I’ve been called the leading expert on American gaming history, I’m sure people are just dying to know what I thnk. Here is my official stance on the issue: Illegal gambling is not a nuisance: for most of US history, it was a persistent illegal market that flourishes because of the gap between public law and personal morality. Today, it is, in most states, a pernicious threat to the revenues of state-sponsored gaming businesses.
If only Kerry’s people had vetted that blurb with a gaming historian, they might have saved themselves a lot of trouble.
Another point: one of the justifications for federal anti-Internet gaming activity is that Internet gaming can be used to launder money and support international terrorism–at least that’s what the Justice Department says. So we come full circle here. Is unsanctioned gambling just a “nuisance,” or is it a serious threat to homeland security?