[NormsRevenge]

President Bush peers through "The Door of No Return", where slaves are said to have passed through to board ships taking them to the Americas and the Carribean, while touring the Slave House on Goree Island, Senegal. CHARLES DHARAPAK, AP

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[TheCrusader]

I thought President Bush's speech was unbalanced, incomplete, politically correct, and utterly lacking in testosterone. Nobody will ever mistake President Bush for an historian, I'm sure. As he rambled on and on with the lurid details of the slave trade, and painted our American ancestors as criminals with cold hearts, he failed miserably to mention the white abolitionists who assisted tens of thousands of slaves to freedom, and who ultimately brought about their freedom. He only mentioned the hundreds of thousands of white Americans who died in the Civil War fighting to end slavery in a passing thought. He never mentioned the Northern States that ended slavery decades before the Emancipation Proclamation.

Starting during the Revolutionary War and ending in the early 1800s, each Northern State adopted separate plans to abolish slavery. A boundary, called the Mason-Dixon Line was established between the Northern States where slavery was illegal and the Southern States where slavery continued. As a result, slaves began to flee across the Mason-Dixon Line and claim freedom in the Northern States. Nor did the President shed any light on the fact that in America's infancy, as we had not yet existed long enough to define ourselves as a nation, much of the rest of the civilized world condoned slavery, and had done so since pre-Biblical times. Bush didn't seem to know that slave trading was abolished in the U.S. in 1807 as a powerful first step towards abolishing it completely. America abolished slave trading long before Spain, France, Sweden, Netherlands and some South American nations did. His indictment of America's past "crimes" was a shallow, ass-kissing venture into Liberia - and he came out with his nose a lot browner that when he went in.