There’s a good article in today’s NYT Magazine. Bush’s debate performances have made it clear that he views the so-called “war” on terrorism as a perpetual fact; he can’t seem to imagine, let alone discuss, how to end it. What’s even more frightening are his reasons for not wanting it to end, but that’s another point.

Whether or not it’s a “war” quickly becomes a question of semantics, but I do agree with what’s put forward as Kerry’s theory of foreign policy, which

…suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler and Stalin — and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind of stature that might actually work in their favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits.

I would add not only grief and fury, but rhetorical and political opportunism — if you call it war, it becomes war — and it’s political suicide to be quoted saying its “not a war.” This is the same rhetorical strategy used to paint Kerry a “fl1p-fl0pper” — whether he is or not, the frequency of use outweighs the truth. This is why bad advertising works: you remember the message, even if you hate it. Interestingly, the same principle is at the root of some critiques of Google’s pagerank algorithim. The fact that I refer to someone or link to a URL does not mean I necessarily endorse (or oppose) the referee, but in a ranking based on frequency of mention, my views aren’t accounted for. The referee’s site simply gets credited with another reference, and their ranking goes up accordingly. An observer might easily conclude that site is more “popular.” One could argue that the Bush campaign is attempting a rhetorical Googlebomb.