If I were on the staff of a Democratic presidential candidate who's name was not Howard Dean, I'd be on the phone with the New York Times this morning screaming blue bloody murder. I posted the specific sentence where Dean said the terrorists had, in a sense, already won. Here's a the entire quote, everything he said in answer to that question.
DEAN: You know, I think in some ways, unfortunately, the terrorists have already won. We have an act that allows American citizens to be held without knowing what they're charged with and without seeing a lawyer. To my knowledge, that hasn't happened since 1798, with the Alien and Sedition Acts.
We can't do that, Tom. We can't -- I think none of us mind being searched and have our shaving kits rummaged through in the airlines and all that. But if we start giving up our fundamental liberties as Americans because terrorists attacked us, then we have a big problem.
I honestly don't believe that John Ashcroft and George Bush and the members of the Federalist Society view the Constitution the way mainstream American attorneys or the way most American citizens do.
We have a right to protection of our liberties. A lot of people died for that in the Revolutionary War. And I am not going to let the right wing of the Republican Party take those liberties away from us.
There's not one but two fairly incendiary comments there. Today's Times does not offer a transcript (the dead tree version) but a sidebar, a box in the middle of the story on the debate with a sample quotation from each of the candidates. Here's what they chose for the quote for Howard Dean:
I think none of us mind being searched and have our shaving kits rummaged through in the airlines and all that. But if we start giving up our fundamental liberties as Americans because terrorists attacked us, then we have a big problem. . . . We have a right to protection of our liberties. A lot of people died for that in the Revolutionary War. And I am not going to let the right wing of the Republican Party take those liberties away from us.
Am I crazy, or did they use ellipses to excise the comments he made that could backfire, leaving in the boilerplate?
I guess it's possible they did similar legwork for the other candidates (and I'm not about to take the time to check) but from where I sit, I can't see how that is possibly a neutral act. Particularly when you consider that the parts taken out are the ones that would be newsworthy (if any of these reporters could stop working on their process stories for long enough to think about the substance of what the candidates are actually saying.)
