If playing a video game in which you’re in control of an automatic weapon-wielding President Bush who kills terrorists as they storm, one-by-one, through the doors of the Oval Office, is your idea of a good time on a Friday night, then you’re in luck. The Associated Press’ Liz Sidoti reported yesterday about just such a game, “Bush Shoot-Out,” which is offered on the Web site miniclip.com. (If you get bored shooting terrorists from your presidential post, you can click over to one of the other games on the site, including “Alien Clones” and “3 Foot Ninja.”)
It’s not the game that prompted Sidoti’s attention, however, but the Republican National Committee ad displayed at various times above and below it, which says: “Senator Kerry says his own vote to ‘abandon our troops’ was reckless and irresponsible.” It then flashes to another screen, which says, “To Listen to Senator Kerry in His Own Words, Click Here!”
Sidoti lets stand the statements that Kerry had voted to “abandon our troops” and later denounced himself as reckless and irresponsible. We, however, were skeptical, so we checked it out.
Turns out that Kerry did use the words “abandon our troops” — but only to say he couldn’t imagine any U.S. senator who ever would. According to The Washington Post, what Kerry told CBS a week before the October 17, 2003 vote on a supplemental appropriations bill for military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, was: “I don’t think any United States senator is going to abandon our troops and recklessly leave Iraq to — to whatever follows as a result of simply cutting and running.”
Sidoti doesn’t bother to tell her readers — and apparently doesn’t know — that the RNC completely reversed the meaning of Kerry’s words. We’ve come to expect the use of misleading rhetoric by national party committees. But on some level we expected better than that from the AP.
Hey, we’re still learning.
–Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.