[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.

[Burkeman1]

Your talking about the history of the Republic which is all but dead. Bush was making a speech to advance the Empire. Get with the program!

[Bogolyubski]

I find it interesting that there was not a word about the slavery and genocide being carried out at this very moment by our good friends in Khartoum. It's easy to be passionate about slaves that have been dead for over a century, of course. This kind of cheap talk is something one would expect of Bill Clinton. What's next - reparations?

[HairOfTheDog]

Good grief..... talk about political correctness.... What you want him to do is political correctness of your own flavor...... In the land where we bought people, you want him to try to soften that by saying "Not all white people were bad"....

Ridiculous. That is not the time and place for it. That is the place to acknowledge the wrong of what happened for a day. For one speech pause and say yeah - we own this history and we aren't proud of it. Enough! We aren't there now.