COLD BLOOD. Hot rhetoric. In his bid to keep the White House, President Bush said in recent speeches:

"We're fighting an enemy that is so cold-blooded, it's hard for many Americans to fathom. These people will cut off your head like that."

"These are cold-blooded killers. You cannot negotiate with these people. You cannot reason."

"These people we face are cold-blooded, committed killers. They're interested in destroying our way of life."

Bush intimates that only an eye-for-eye Republican is up to the job of dealing with terrorists. "Evidently, some must think that you can negotiate with them, you can talk sense to them, you can hope that they change," Bush has said. "That's not what I know. I know, in order to deal with these people we must bring them to justice before they hurt us again. And so, we're on the offense."

In one speech, Bush sparked laughs by saying about terrorists, "Therapy is not going to work with them."

It is the Democrats who need therapy. Thus far they have been moths flying into the burning Bush. At his speech at the DNC, vice presidential nominee John Edwards declared, "We will have one clear unmistakable message for Al Qaeda and these terrorists. You cannot run. You cannot hide. We will destroy you."

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry recently said he would reduce the number of troops in Iraq during his first six months in office. But in a speech this week to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, Kerry also said he would double the Army's special forces so "we can find and get the terrorists before they get us." He promised to fight "a smarter, more effective war on terror. We will deploy every tool in our arsenal -- our economic as well as our military might, our principles, as well as our firepower. And only then will we be able to tell the terrorists, `You will lose and we will win.' "

Kerry's speech to the veterans comes on top of his recent declaration that he would have still voted to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq, even if he knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had no tie to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Bush depicts himself as on the offense. The Democrats are so much on the defense, they boast they will use even more troops to destroy the terrorists. Bush's false reasons for war may evoke memories of Richard Nixon, but the Democrats are trying to win this election trying to be the next Lyndon Johnson.

What is particularly disgusting about the stance of the Democratic candidates is that their acceptance of the war gives every appearance that they also accept the unintended casualties of war. The terrorists of 9/11 should, of course, be hunted down. But given their elusiveness, capturing the ringleaders of Al Qaeda will probably be more through espionage, a cell-phone slip-up, GPS, or a midnight raid rather than cluster bombs.

By saying he would still vote for the Iraq invasion, Kerry seems to endorse the loss of between 3,200 and 7,300 Iraqi civilians in the initial invasion, according to estimates by news agencies and think tanks. By saying he would still vote for the invasion, Kerry also accepts how Americans were numbed by the Bush administration not to care about Iraqi civilians, even as we claimed to liberate them.

The United States refused to make any civilian death counts even though it will say how many "insurgents" were killed. In an April press briefing, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt was asked about images on Arab TV of American soldiers purportedly killing Iraqi children. Kimmitt's response was straight out of 1984. "My solution is quite simple: change the channel. Change the channel to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station. The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda and that is lies. So you want a solution? Change the channel."

The US-propped-up Iraqi interim government did change the channel this month, shutting down the Baghdad office of Arab satellite television network Al Jazeera for 30 days. We have unnecessary carnage and censorship, and Kerry would still vote for this?

Things were going so badly in Iraq that Kerry came from big deficits in several major polls into a close race with Bush on who can better handle terrorism and Iraq. But very recent polls by Pew and Time show that Bush has stopped his free fall and is back up to 56 to 58 percent approval ratings on his handling of terrorism. That may foretell that Kerry's go-along-to-get-along, but I-can-do-it-better claim may already be at the end of its effective use.

Bush may be in trouble because he is emulating Nixon. But it is doubtful he will be beaten by John Lyndon Baines Kerry.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

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