Robert C. Koehler: Separating the cross and the sword
What is a gaffe but an inadvertent uttering of an awkward truth? For instance:
“This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”
The “gaffe” part of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 announcement that the War on Terror had begun was, of course, his calling it a crusade. Doing so, as the Wall Street Journal put it at the time, was “indelicate,” because:
“In strict usage, the word describes the Christian military expeditions a millennium ago to capture the Holy Land from Muslims. But in much of the Islamic world,
