Check the transcripts - Cheney speech

Let me apologize for being late on this. The Kerry partisans have been screeching bloody murder about how Vice President Cheney used scare tactics in a speech in Iowa a few days ago. Well, when one checks the transcripts, Cheney didn't didn't come near to saying "Vote for Kerry and you die" which is what Maureen Dowd from the NYT ed page alleges. Please excuse the length but reproduced below is the context with key phrases italicized:

"Now, he's (Kerry, ed.) said that he would use military force. He'd like to do it in the fairly traditional way, when the U.S. is attacked. My argument would be, we've already been attacked. We suffered 3,000 casualties. And the success of our efforts, and something that I think every American cares about, our ability to be able to ensure that our children and grandchildren are going to be able to live in a safe and secure world depends upon the basic fundamental decisions we're making now.

We made decisions at the end of World War II, at the beginning of the Cold War, when we set up the Department of Defense, and the CIA, and we created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and undertook a bunch of major policy steps that then were in place for the next 40 years, that were key to our ultimate success in the Cold War, that were supported by Democrat and Republican alike -- Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and Gerry Ford and a whole bunch of Presidents, from both parties, supported those policies over a long period of time. We're now at that point where we're making that kind of decision for the next 30 or 40 years, and it's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice. 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 have to understand it is a war. It's different than anything we've ever fought before. But they mean to do everything they can to destroy our way of life. They don't agree with our view of the world. They've got an extremist view in terms of their religion. They have no concept or tolerance for religious freedom. They don't believe women ought to have any rights. They've got a fundamentally different view of the world, and they will slaughter -- as they demonstrated on 9/11 -- anybody who stands in their way. So we've got to get it right. We've got to succeed here. We've got to prevail. And that's what is at stake in this election.

Clearly what Cheney is saying here is that your vote this election is a choice between passive defense or aggressively hunting terrorists where they live before you're attacked. And that the choice that we as a nation make will resound for decades with one being a lot more risky than the other.

He's right on point.