Eugene Volokh goes on a rant: New York Times magazine quotes Kerry as saying the following,

When . . . Kerry [was asked] what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," Kerry said. "As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."

Sounds like a truism, doesn't it? There will always be terrorists around; as long as bombs are not impossible to obtain, there will always be people who want to blow things up; the goal should be to come up with a set of policies and actions that reduce terrorism to an absolute minimum. Duh.

Apparently it bothers Eugene Volokh:

...what remarkable analogies Kerry started with: prostitution and illegal gambling. The way law enforcement has dealt with prostitution and illegal gambling is by occasionally trying to shut down the most visible and obvious instances, tolerating what is likely millions of violations of the law per year, de jure legalizing many sorts of gambling, and de jure legalizing one sort of prostitution in Nevada, and de facto legalizing many sorts of prostitution almost everywhere; as best I can tell, "escort services" are very rarely prosecuted, to the point that they are listed in the Yellow Pages.

These are examples of practical surrender...

I've observed Republicans trying to paint Kerry as "soft on terrorism" for a while now and it always comes down to a distortion of something Kerry said. This, however, is plainly comical: pick a couple of examples Kerry briefly tossed around and write long, detailed posts examining other aspects of these examples that Kerry plainly did not mean. How does one get to be such a wilfully bad reader?