VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., May 5, 2005 -- I recently read of a desperation move by a group called MoveOn PAC that has begun a deliberate campaign of misinformation in order to block President Bush’s judicial nominees. They have lifted remarks that I made on the ABC program “This Week” completely out of context and have distorted the meaning of what I said. I resent people who deliberately distort the truth for their own political aims. George Stephanopoulos asked me a question of whether the decisions of the Supreme Court Judges are a more serious threat than Islamic terrorists who slammed into the World Trade Center. These words came from Stephanopoulos, not me. Such a statement was never included in my book, Courting Disaster, nor had I made it before. Nevertheless, in answer to his questions, I said, “It depends on how you look at culture. If you look over the course of a 100 years, I think the gradual erosion of the consensus that has held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings. I think we are going to control al-Qaeda. I think we are going to get Osama bin Laden. We won in Afghanistan, we won in Iraq, and we can contain that. But if there is erosion at home, you know, Thomas Jefferson warned about a tyranny of an oligarchy, and if we surrender our democracy to the tyranny of an oligarchy, we have made a terrible mistake.”

From that statement, it is clear that I said that the United States was in the process of defeating the evil terrorists who brought on the 9/11 tragedy. In no way did I diminish that tragedy. To lift ten words out of that paragraph and make believe that I in any way diminished the awful suffering of 9/11 is nothing but an outright falsehood.

I applaud the efforts of our President to root out terrorism in every nation where it appears. However, as I made clear in the Stephanopoulos interview on “This Week,” over the course of the next 100 years, the moral fabric of the United States of America will be much more important than today’s current war on terror. I am convinced that future history will bear me out.

I call on democratic partisans, especially left-wingers such as Jim Wallis of Sojourner, to forsake their desperate attempt at misinformation.