MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Issue Two: The Global Test. Listen closely, please, to the first sentence and the second sentence for the words "global test."

SEN. KERRY: (From videotape.) No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, nor would I, the right to preempt, in any way necessary, to protect the United States of America. But if and when you do it, Jim, you've got to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test, where your countrymen, your people, understand fully why you're doing what you're doing, and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

PRESIDENT BUSH: (From videotape.) I'm not exactly sure what you mean, "passes the global test." You take preemptive action if you pass a global test? My attitude is you take preemptive action in order to protect the American people, that you act in order to make this country secure.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: "Global test." This language was immediately seized on by President Bush, as you saw, and later that night by Vice President Cheney, who continued the "global test" attack in Colorado.

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: (From videotape.) On the one case, we've got in George Bush a man who's done it, who's been there, done it for four different years now and done a superb job; and the wannabe senator who says that, in response to the question on preemptive action, he would support it as long as it passed some kind of global test.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Question: Is this a cheap trick by Bush and Cheney, or is it a true reading of Kerry's two sentences on the subject of preemptive strikes? Lawrence O'Donnell.

MR. O'DONNELL: It's a cheap trick. What Kerry is obviously saying is there's no specific test involved here. It's just that you have to have the sense that if you're doing a preemptive strike that your country is with you, which is where he began, and that the world will understand it.

That's the test: Will the world understand it? Not necessarily get the world to approve it, not even a majority of the world, but will he be able to communicate to the world why he's done it?

Now, it didn't surprise me when President Bush said, "I don't think I understand what you mean by a global test." I'm not sure the president understood anything that Kerry said.

[...]

MR. O'DONNELL: He was lost. The president was lost last night.

Source: mclaughlin.com

Labels: bush