I listened to the 2004 U.S. Presidential Inauguration on the radio, and was neither thrilled nor depressed.
Bush places a framework around the global issues we face – that the only real defense against terrorism is to eliminate it by addressing the root causes, which are not poverty but lack of freedom and ideologies of rage which are growing up in response to oppression.
I like that.
But a lot needs to go into the framework.I have consistently hammered Bush for failing to make the case for the war, and for failing to go beyond high rhetoric to tie our policies to that high framework, and for being absent when it comes time to stand up and speak both to us in the West and to the real audience – those in the Muslim world who are facing the choice between Islamist rage and a future. We have to offer them a choice; we have to paint that future they may choose as one that is both attainable and worth having.
I’m going to make one of my messages a regular one trying to keep track of what the Administration is doing on that front.
It’s not enough. It’s not likely to ever be “enough”. But they damn well better do more.
AL: does that “more” involve nukes or surrender ?
Raining bombs or raining gold bars on them ?
And if its not either of those, does it involve incantations vinyl LPs spinning backwards, black chickens or a frog ?
For example, if we invade N Korea and the resistence folds under our boot like a dixie cup (the reality would probably be quite horrificly the opposite) and we found ourselves at war with china (most likly result) would you gain a new affection for the voices of caution that warned beforehand ?
What makes you think that the goal of freedoms advance wont be as long and hard fought as it has been up to now ?
Even here at home we saw protestors on our streets today, that if in charge, would be adding my head to their pile of 174 Million skulls, and a media in sympathy with them
Their every design is toxic, every TV Talking head worked in the word “Hubris” from the universally agreed talking point memo, fresh from their group huddle around the text of his speach.
If we took all the talking head leftists out and shot them, it would indeed save upwards of a billion lives from further decades under the leftist iron boot.
But we cant do that can we, so given the realities of the limits of our action, just what is this “more” your taking about.
drop the hammer
Bush put a framework around an empty set. Where will we be spreading freedom next? How are we going to pay for the current adventure? Will we be adopting any form of shared sacrifice; if not tax increases, then a draft?
Focus for a moment and just imagine what invading Iran will mean. Think about the topography, the logistics, the straits of Hormuz, and then tote up all the doughty allies we’re going to have by our side.
And this statement is just mind-boggling: _Even here at home we saw protestors on our streets today, that if in charge, would be adding my head to their pile of 174 Million skulls, and a media in sympathy with them._
What in the hell is this supposed to mean? All protesters are Stalinists? Nazis? Everyone left of McCarthy is a mass-murderer? Does this include Truman? Are you slyly including Hiroshima and Nagasaki in your body count?
This inauguration seems to have signalled, not merely a departure from the surly bounds of the Enlightenment, but the surly bounds of sanity.
Reagan gave lots of speaches, he answered lots of questions, in every public moment he used the bully pulpit of his office.
Sadly, America was aware of perhaps 0.05% of what he said, and what made it past the Lefist media filter was twisted and ridiculed.
Very seldom did his words make it to the people, the state of the union addresses perhaps the only time the marxist press ever allowed complete themes pass to the public.
GW Bush lives in the land of leftist filter Deja Vu, our alternate sources mean we get a lot more, but he moist still repeat a sentence 1000 times before the public hears it, and even then its blunted by a toxic leftist media that sifts his words for opening for attack and ridicule.
Double that for the Aims Goals and likly results of policy.
When I grew to understand this reality, I gained a the badly needed understanding why a president, even the most well intended good and decent man surrounded by some of the best talent our country has to offer, would find the delivery of even the most perfect of message and benevolent and flawless policy, only one evil marxist TV talking heads insight away from headlines painting Him as the antichrist.
Look at how AG Ashcroft is painted, a good and decent and honest man, Yet the talking heads conversation about him start with the primise that he is evil incarnate.
To those of us that dont swallow that CommuNazi propaganda, it might not tell us much about Ashcroft, but in its years of consistency, such informs us of the blackness of the hearts of the mesingers, the inherent defacto dishonesty of it all.
You learn how they can belong to the religion of Murder mountain, you learn that the actual evil of this earth does not exist in gothic forms with wings of skin over bone, horns and tails, but in people that often look like you, laugh at jokes and kind to their pets.
The nazis loved their children, read stories to them and tucked them in at night. it took plumbers bricklayers machinests lawyers and enginners to make the war machine and the extermination ovens work.
It required all the burocrats, and the farmers.
All it took,,, any one of the leftist flavors,,, where the rights of the single individual,,, is inferior to the needs of society,,, for the blackest evils and greatest of all inhumanities to man to come forth.
Thats all it took.
The govt of Ejypt is Socialist, Arafat was Socialist, Kadafy is a Socialist all thru the middle east, Socialism, and its the Nazi flavor leftover from WWII that you find there, Not the Maoist Or Stalinist flavor.
Syria, Baath Socialist, Saddam, Baath Socialist they too, children of the Nazis, all the way back to when the Grand Mufti of jerusalem broadcast from radio Berlin.
A.L, i dont need much “filling in” the grand themes and broad strokes is all i need, those of us not brainwashed with leftist evil knows well enough what the details are, that such policy can range from final tuning on a 4 year old plan, all the way to nimbly taking atvantage of opertunities.
One of the reasons our solgers are so effective is because they think for themselves, you can give them broad objectives and leave to them the details, its why i get angry when i see marxocrat ankle biters demanding a maoist-style “Five Year Plan” their leftist slave mind think does not accept the idea of goals serving as plans.
The leftist mindset does not understand a free man living without dictate of goverment
The free man that decides what is best for him self without the “help” of central planers and work quotas.
Our free thinking solger and our economy of free thinkers and actors is beyond the understanding but not the contempt of the CommuNazi left.
I didnt need the fine details that even if perfect for today are irevelant tomorrow, for us free thinkers, the kind that need no intensive de-moonie deprogramming to understand something as basic that a progressive income tax has already crossed the line into the evil and perverse.
If you already understand the principles, the natural laws of the universe,,, you already understand the mechanisms that function within it.
In electronics, it means your 1000 watt amp needs no “plan” it means the device becomes defined by what parts you find available on the hamfest swapmeat tables, you have no idea what it will look like or what parts it will use untill you come home with the parts.
Ive built a good 20 of those.
Advancing Freedom dont need a master plan either,
all it needs is to be valued by those that can make a difference, what to do in this case or that ? we will see when we come to this and that.
Stickler
Wasnt around in the Reagan years eh ?
The left flailed arms and foam drenched their smelly dirty shirts, time after time it looked like a spooked gaggle of gremlin-mugwi every time Reagan gave a speach.
How dare he call the most evil regime ever to exist on earth,
(Murdered 62 million of their own people)
an “Evil Empire”
Agast ! how dare he say that He is going to take us to nuclear war saying things like that !!!
At every turn the manic left, the followered of the blood stained religion, screamed.
Well, thats when they wasnt praising the singular regime of mass death as the Wonderfull workers paradise we should emulate.
Proving to any willing to accept the grim evidence, that the USSR’s defenders was as evil as the evil regime they praised and defended.
Raymond:
_Well, thats when they wasnt praising the singular regime of mass death as the Wonderfull workers paradise we should emulate.
Proving to any willing to accept the grim evidence, that the USSR’s defenders was as evil as the evil regime they praised and defended._
This post wins you some sort of award in the War on Straw Men.
But it has f***-all to do with the real, live, expensive, shooting war we’re in right now. What countries are we going to invade next? At what cost? Which taxes will be raised to pay for these invasions? Who will be drafted to invade them? Will the locals welcome our Freedom(TM)? Do we have evidence from Iraq so far to test any assertions arising from these questions?
Is our children learning?
>ideologies of rage which are growing up in response to oppression.
I’d be interested to see more discussion of this. The 9/11 hijackers were not oppressed. Neither was Tim Mcveigh, nor the Columbine killers.
Now I do agree that lack of freedom can shield people from the consequences of their beliefs and ideologies, so more freedom can expose belief-systems and theories that do not work. But it’s not only lack of freedom, it’s also oil money which allows societies to believe & promote all sorts of things without suffering adverse consequences.
After 9/11, it was discussed whether or not it was appropriate to call the hijackers “cowards”, in addition to being evil. I think so, for this reason: All these hijackers were taught from early on that they had a superior religion, a superior culture, that they were superior beings. Then they had to face the fact, and live with the shame, of recognizing that another society was more advanced technologically, militarily, economically. Their response to this shame was not to try to build their societies up, which would have been the courageous thing to do, but instead to try to tear other societies down, while killing themselves so that they would no longer have to face up to all these unpleasant, shame-inducing facts.
roublen
And in the end you still wont have utopia, but untidy, messy unpredictable freedom.
Kinda sucks, well except for all the alternatives.
Should we deny the asperations of some 50 million people in Iraq and Afgan because their will remain intractibles, whoes death is required to remove the threat of them ?
… No
Well, I thought this was about the oil? Can’t we, like… sell the oil or something?
I too would like to see “more.” I’d like to have some confidence that we’ve sent Special Forces into Iran to build a serious revolutionary network. But then, the only person who might tell us about that out of time is Sy Hersh, and I don’t want him shooting his mouth off too much. So I can tolerate a little self-imposed ignorance about that for awhile.
But I’d like to see more commitment given to the details of transitions to democracy from various forms of authoritarianism. That seems sort of ad hoc or nonexistent at the moment. Even PNAC isn’t very detail oriented. That’s one thing.
He promised pressure against those friendly authoritarians who are stabbing us in the back with their state-owned media, so I’d like to see some pressure from the Democrats if he doesn’t deliver on that, instead of sniping about how we’re losing a war we’re winning, I mean. That’s another thing.
I’d like to see him get off his duff and remind us of this project, and why it’s important, like… once every 45 days at least. That’s another thing.
I’d like to see us catch some of these seemingly invulnerable leaders, like Zarqawi, Bin Laden, Zawahiri, etc., and then just clam up about it after giving them the onscreen lice and cavity search. That’s another thing.
Just kidding about selling the oil, of course. But we could sell baby food and camping gear to the people who are selling their own oil.
That’d be good for starters.
From my perspective we have three linked problems, and Bush can’t acknowledge any of them, which makes it hard to address the real war. But he’s doing worse than that by identifying one of the problems as part of the solution, and by talking up a displacement fight – a struggle we would like to have instead of the ones we do have. That’s bad. We can’t have “instead of,” we can only have “as well as.”
Now let me make that more specific.
We’ve assembled something like a demographic Kevorkian machine, and turned it on. I think large parts of Europe are walking dead already, and we can lose a lot more unless we face up to this problem.
But politically this is in the too-hard basket. I understand that Bush can’t mention it, even if he is conscious of it (and he may not be.)
Problem number two is jihad, which combined with booming Muslim demograpics and rapid population movements and our suicidal demographics is producing the long tern results of a successful genocidal war – with us doing the bulk of our own population reduction.
As soon as Al Qaeda gets nukes, or even as soon as Iran gets them, jihad can go from problem number two to problem number one. Nukes can cull us faster than we can cull ourselves, and they have other impacts that create political and cultural tipping points and can change the game completely.
But all this is generally in the too-hard basket too. We can’t fight a religion, because of our civilised inhibitions as well as because of our corrupted culture, and it’s too bad that there is a religion with no lack of zeal to fight us.
Problem number three is a split and profoundly culturally diseased West, which is what is putting problems of civilisation-ending proportions in the too-hard basket.
But you can’t even mention obvious media bias without it being whining and counterproductive. A culture war is and needs to be off the table. So I accept that this goes in the too-hard basket too.
So we’ve got three “silent” problems, what are the solutions, or the substitutes for solutions?
(1) Put a completely unfocused domestic agenda in place of the “D” word. That’s OK, I accept we can’t do much better than that.
(2) Move Islam/jihad/the Koran from the “problem” column to the “solution” column. We haven’t advanced a step beyond “Islam means peace.” That’s worse than silence.
(3) In place of the real (jihad) world war we do have and can’t get out of, define a fake war on all non-democracy everywhere, in which it is our aim to end tyranny absolutely. All reformers, it seems, may hope for our aid. (The Dalai Lama will be so pleased!) All non-democrats, in Burma, China and everywhere else, may as well combine against us now, because we’re coming for them all.
This, instead of fighting the war we do have, which may do for us. Because fighting Islam is politically tough, and because fighting for democracy and against tyranny (all tyranny, everywhere) is rhetorically nice, the way a world free of injustice and bullying is nice to dream about.
I think this speech is just American rhetorical boiler-plate, with very little connection to the real world. Anyway I hope so.
I do not believe we have a problem that is: all political communities everywhere other than democracies are deadly to us, so in our self-defence they must all go. In general, I think if a state’s policies are generally friendly and it’s stable, that’s fine.
I think our problem is that Islam, a transnational entity divided into states rather than a set of states with something in common, has proved it is an exception, like Naziism was. This particular entity must change, and I mean preferably in the way that Naziism was changed.
It is essentially an accident that it is non-democratic. But it is a happy accident. I agree with the terrorists: what they are doing is pure Islam, and democracy is pure poison for them. So there is a way to rip the guts out of this enemy culture, and it is one we can be morally comfortable with.
Great! As long as we remember that we are not out to beat the whole world into virtue, but only to democratise essentially in order to liquidate one particular sort of culture that set the terms as “you or we must die” and proved that they weren’t kidding and that we have no choice but to do for them rather than be done for by them.
I do not think universal freedom and an end to all bullying and all oppression is a good war aim. I do not believe the meek are about to inherit the earth, with or without an increase in the American defence budget. (Or should that now be the American world liberation budget?)
And by the way, if the meek do inherit the Earth, I want to see how long they can hang onto it.
David, I think we do need to name the enemy more explicitly (and here’s someone else who agrees with you.) But, I don’t think this inaugural address was the place to do it. The inaugural is a peculiarly American ritual in which the election winner, before descending into the mud and blood of day to day politics, gets a chance to put forward an affirmative agenda. That works best when he reaches into the core of the American project and myth, and connects it to a vision of the future. JFK’s was the recent epitome – delivered at a time when the national audience was most unified by mass media, and Lincoln’s second is a parallel for our nation in a time of war.
I think better of Bush’s speech than AL does, because I think it accomplished that goal of tying core beliefs to vision. It did not name Iraq (or Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or…) because it was not about destroying any particular enemy or winning a specific battle, but about a vision that can sustain our will through a long fight, and align the efforts of government and citizens toward that goal. It’s also a clear rebuke to putting realpolitik at the core of the American foreign policy, and a rather bold attempt to create a functioning synthesis between the Jacksonian and Wilsonian views of that policy.
The address is also an amazing summary of Bush’s personal and policy odyssey: From skepticism about nation building before 9/11, to an Iraq campaign framed partially in democratization – but not sold that way, to putting a revolutionary world vision at the core of his policy and legacy.
How that speech and vision are regarded in retrospect will rest on outcomes. There I’m entirely with AL – I’ll be watching, and pushing, towards an implementation that draws on the vision while reflecting the realities of resources, timing, and avoiding the eruption of a full war of civilizations. Bush needs to do more overt connection of dots from grand vision to implementation, and I expect him to do so in ways that reach around the distortion of the legacy media. The State of the Union will be the first test. There you will have to read past the domestic agenda and political positioning, but Bush should be putting this vision at the core of the speech, and connecting it to concrete actions as far as is prudent to air publicly.
David, Tim,
But we should ignore our pangs for instant gratification.
When he said our ability was not unlimited yet considerable, that all that should be needed.
Principles re-affirmed that we will do what we can when we can.
You all sound like those spooked moonbats that went screaming and diving under the desks to duck nukes because Reagan Dared call the USSR an “Evil Empire”
Lays things out better than i ever could.
“Bush’s inaugural speech was mostly derived from Sharansky’s ideas.”:http://strangewomenlyinginponds.typepad.com/strange_women_lying_in_po/
” Throughout the book, Sharansky sets forth a very persuasive argument that the appeal of freedom is the greatest weapon held by the free world against tyranny, but this is often hampered by the lack of moral clarity in the free world. As Sharansky puts it, after he was finally released by his Soviet jailers and was allowed to emigrate to Israel, he came to”
bq. understand a critical difference between the world of fear and the world of freedom. In the former, the primary challenge is finding the inner strength to confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil.
And puts some focus on something that registers very important to me,
The lefts inability to see evil ( apart from self hatererd of western culture and liberty) the fact that they are morally obtuse outside of a poltical calculated grasp for power, their war agaist reality, their end justify means mode of operation that prevents them from having a moral clarity.
In fact they denounce and ridicule moral clarity
The left today, are the enemy within, acting inder the direction of a blood stained idology that has them acting as the fith collumn even when that isnt their intent.
When the action and effect is identical, what revelence after all is intent. (usefull idiots) they share the venues with the evil intended hard core leftist and refuse to seperate themselves, so again distinctions are meaningless.
Reagan filled in his words with action, even in defiance of the evil boland amendment(that intended for the communists to succeed in central america.)
Hugo Chavez is adopting the Mugabe model in the Americas, not the softer Swedish model we can accept.
Hopefully, He has got the message.
Tim, you were right: Diana West’s piece in the Washington Times does speak for me.
And I agree with you that I don’t think this inaugural address was the time or place say that. An inaugural is a very American art form, like a colossal Japanese tea ceremony. There are things you say and don’t say there. You recite the faith-of-our-fathers, and reality has very little to do with it. That is why I was not disturbed by the speech, on the assumption that it has little to do with reality.
I had not considered how an inaugural is also about articulation a positive vision. It is ceremony, but it goes beyond that. So I found your remarks on that in a historic context helpful. I’ll be looking forward to the State of the Union now.
Also, I can see that you can’t beat something with nothing. A vicious ideology must be attacked on every level, and a superior alternative must be presented.
In her justly famous column after 11 September 2001, Anne Coulter said: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” I quite like Anne Coulter, if only because she often says things that make me think, “no that’s wrong and going too far; what she should have said is – heyy, that’s a thought!” Basically she was right: it was and is war, we had to invade, we had to remove at least some of the most hostile leaders, and we had to convert the hostile populations. But to what? Christianity, her suggestion, is a good first thought in that it puts the crucial religious issue up-front-and-centre. But it has the huge disadvantage that we can’t even convert ourselves to that. You can’t get the Church of England and Episcopal priests to stick to the script.
So we have a need for an alternative vision splendid. And in this inaugural speech, I think George W. Bush tried to lay out a splendid vision, with a shining future for all and plenty of God. Which is great. Whether it works or not, in war you have to attempt the things necessary for victory. (And I think George W. Bush is a great war leader, in part just because when we get to the point of giving it a try or giving up, he tries.)
Tim Oren: “It’s also a clear rebuke to putting realpolitik at the core of the American foreign policy, and a rather bold attempt to create a functioning synthesis between the Jacksonian and Wilsonian views of that policy.”
Well, I also “got” that rebuke, and I do not agree with it. Nor does that synthesis rub me the right way.
Raymond: “You all sound like those spooked moonbats that went screaming and diving under the desks to duck nukes because Reagan Dared call the USSR an “Evil Empire””
Do we? I didn’t mean to. I meant to sound like someone who has a lot of time for Henry Kissinger, without being so exact a student that I become completely unlike the master in never having any thoughts of my own.
I just put his picture of diplomacy in a slightly different context, and then read off some different results and exceptions based on demography and history. (And I have some different moral values from Henry the K., and I call my moral values “morality” instead of “national honour” as he does, and so on.)
I think we need that context, those exceptions. “Realism” in foreign policy is being taken too far, it’s being applied in such a dogmatic, inflexibly pure way that it becomes completely unrealistic and suicidal. When you think it is OK essentially to allow the liquidation of friendly populations and replace them with imported and fast-bred hostile populations, because after all the borders haven’t changed (yet!) and you are a “realist,” I think it’s time to say, with Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
The traditional “realistic” model has a lot of tacit assumptions that our circumstances break.
Muslim and modern Christian populations are like iron filings and black sawdust. (I don’t care, for this metaphor, which is which.) They may look the same, but if you want to organise them, one responds to strong magnetic fields and the other needs a rake. If you make a strong Christian appeal to Muslims or vice versa, it’s futile. Systems of organising those little black specs (like states) act differently because of that. The differences are significant, because big ideas, like the separation of church and state (“Give unto Caesar . . . “) or Sharia as divine legislation are not held in common. I think Bernard Lewis is fundamentally right that Islam is a religion divided into states, not a set of states with a cultural heirloom in common.
And when you change big things like that, different actions become appropriate. When you change demographics in huge ways, the game changes. When you change the technology, so that non-state actors can readily do unacceptable damage to states, the playing field is drastically altered again.
And, simply, usually ideology does not trump rational state interest considerations, but sometimes it does. And when it does, you have to allow for it. And it does now.
I keep sticking Naziism and Islam together not just out of emotion, but because I think Naziism was a genuinely state-transcendent ideology with an awesome potential that fortunately was aborted by some idiotic decisions of one A. Hitler and by military defeat. (You can see the potential that it had from the fascination that it still exerts.) And I see Islam in a similar way, as a militant, militaristic, state-transcending ideology, only it’s far too late to personally defeat and discredit Muhammed. That’s a problem. It’s a big enough problem to generate large exceptions.
But all this is not to say that our foreign policy should _generally_ be about the direct enforcement of global moral visions. I don’t think it should be. I think it should serve Caesar, and not, except in exceptional circumstances, God. The moral bit essentially proceeds from the churches in the state which gains in power because of the effectiveness of the civil sword, of which diplomacy is an aspect. (That is, if your system is reasonably healthy, which demographics prove the Europeans are not.) If you are saying your military and diplomatic policies should proceed _in general_ from militant morality, I think you are making a fundamental mistake and being less wise than crusaders who thought they were responding to particular problems.
Or, you may be making excellent sense, but speaking from a perspective that doesn’t suppose the continuation of our own system, which assumes the separation of church and state. You may be a logical jihadi, or a sensible Communist, or an advocate of some new and hopefully nicer militant ideology. But if you are aiming to keep us as a going concern – and I think it’s too late for that in Europe – old-style diplomacy has a claim on at least your attention unless exceptional circumstances apply.
I accept the necessity of ideological struggle in dealing with Islam, but only in dealing with Islam and other ideologies that prove they are exceptional and dangerous enough that we can’t safely ignore the exception. I do not want us trying to enforce morality on China and parts beyond. I don’t think we’d like the price tag.
David, excellent !
Values and Principle is indeed important, in fact central, without them you are set adrift, the moral foundation of your action becomes vapor, the distiction between right and wrong, freedom and slavery, the superior and the inferior vanishes.
National Socialism, International Socialism, the islamic menace, all of them deny the freedom of the individual.
Europe is dieing because the toxic leftist destruction of the family is nearly complete.
What the left did to the black family in America they are doing to all of the peoples of Europe.
The overbearing state and the total leftist brainwashing has almost totaly destroyed the percived merit of a normal Family of a Man wife and 3 kids, with the leftist taxed-to-death burden and crushing socialism that litterly beats the sprit out of humanity with the leftist iron fist.
Its a parasite mentality economy of the self. all hope for any success is snuffed and with it any hope for any future, and the hope that was once invested in their children is strangled.
Just look at the Birth rates Conservative vs Marxcrat in the USA.
Europe can no longer defend itself, and the leftist poison has destroyed even their idea that their own lives or way of life is worth saving.
Look how close the USA came to falling onto the same abys before we pulled back from the brink.
…
Is china to be feared more than the old USSR was at the time ? No, but enough to avoid military conflict with them if we can.
It would be possible to undermine China and change it from within, but not with the iron grip the leftist idology has Europe, they no longer have the ability to see anything wrong with China.
Leftism has washed any idea of right and wrong from their minds, If china was to butcher 10 Million of their own people tomorrow, leftist Europe, who already shrugs pass mass graves of children in Iraq, would show something less than mild distraction from the soccer game, during which they wondered how the USA could be blamed. “hmm no poltical angle to denounce the scapegoat that excues my pathetic existence, the evil USA, so never mind.”
So its basically up to us alone, and we have the same undermining death rot of leftist toxin here at home.
It remains to those of us who still think we have a way of life worth saving, we have two idologies that aim to enslave us, Islam and Leftism, if we are to survive, we must fight both with bullets bombs and ballots.
And we might still lose, but if we do not fight, our loss is certain, and our children will be slaves or dead.
Another excellent take on the word of Pres, GWB
bq. Every conservative criticism of the speech I’ve read is a variant on the same theme: Bush couldn’t possibly have meant what he said; therefore, he was either confused or lying. How dare he!
bq. This only proves how necessary, even vital, was this address: even conservatives have lost the ideological core that was once America. We as the people no longer truly believe in liberty, not as Americans did for the first sesquicentennial. We have become cynical; we are little, green pieces of rock.
bq. The new Bush call to liberty is not rash. It does not require we drop everything to march to the crusade, launching simultaneous attacks on Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Russia. Neither does it prohibit temporary alliances with tyrannies in order to defeat larger ones, as in World War II. But it does say that no longer will we acquiesce in another nation’s tyranny simply for our own convenience. We will not overturn elections, overthrow democracies, or even, by our money and our silence, encourage autocracies to crack down on their own people’s natural, godly desire for freedom. Appeasement is a tactic of weakness, and we are strong.
bq. We have done these things before; we justified them in the name of a higher cause: trade, security, anticommunism. But Bush notes that, in the long run, we cannot rely on trade with dictatorships; and tyranny (not poverty) begets terrorism, which threatens America’s security; and we cannot fight an ideology like Communism — or militant Islamism — without an equally robust ideology of our own… you can’t defeat something with nothing. Our “something” is liberty; and without it, we are nothing more than the new Roman Empire, adrift in an ocean of relativism and cynical realism.
bq. This is foreign to our character. It is un-American. It is French.
bq. To the extent that the dinosaurs of the movement — Buckley, Noonan — cannot recognize their own jadedness, they have become unhelpful. To the extent they fight against the new revivalism of that old time ideology of liberty, they give aid and comfort to the enemy… not only the internationalists across the aisle but even the torturers and beheaders across the sea. There may once have been an epoch of accomodation; but if so, it’s time to move on. That was then.
bq. This is now, today. And today, the watchword is liberty, and America is its guardian — for all, at least by word if not always deed. Time for us all to learn it; it comes as second-nature to us Americans, if we’ll just stop talking ourselves out of it.
“From Powerline”:http://powerlineblog.com/archives/009284.php
Yes ! Direct, Unapologetic, say it like we mean it !
And when we act, act with the conviction that we know we are right. Because we are.
Freedom over leftist Tyranny, Freedom over Slavery, Freedom over Opression
Talk it, walk it, lets act like we mean it.
Thanks for the kind words, Raymond.
Instapundit is changing my mind. Maybe I am not the right reader to evaluate the president’s speech. Austin Bay said the speech is working in Iraq (link), and I agree winning the war is the main thing.
Maybe I misunderestimated George W. Bush! It seems easy to do. 😉