thanks for posting...
bump for later
It will go down as one of the great inaugural speechs because it is entirely focused on a universal ideal and exhorts all to aspire to achieving it. Further it does something that no other speech by an American president has ever done (that I know of) by stating clearly that the American Revolution is humanity's revolution and not just America's and that America is prepared to act on this premise. All through the cold war I was troubled by our backing of any regime no matter how reprehensible if it professed to be anti-Communist. It always seemed to me that the issue was freedom and not just Communism. President Bush has now stated flatly that the world's conflicts are about freedom and that America stands squarely with any people who aspire to be free. If Americans take this seriously and act on it (as President Bush as acted on it in his first term) it has the potential to be huge. Freedom is the key to fighting poverty, disease, ignorance and the suffering imposed by humans upon one another.
Mondo magnanimity, unrealistic and a great weakness, too bad . . . the angel in the whirlwind now stirs.
The Iranian students are going to cheer this line!
Statements like this uplift the morale of the world's dissidents in a very real way. They people hear them and are affected by them. An imprisoned Soviet dissident wrote that when Reagan called the USSR the Evil Empire, word of it spread like wildfire as the prisoners tapped the news through the walls. They loved it.
In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence, instead of laboring on the edge of subsistence. This is the broader definition of liberty that motivated the Homestead Act, the Social Security Act, and the G.I. Bill of Rights.
This line bugs me a little. It agrees with an expanded definition of freedom that includes freedom from want, which is a socialist definition. This is a slippery slope. On the other hand, we've been on this slippery slope since the New Deal, so Bush is really just recognizing the definition that most modern Americans agree with. Hopefully Bush's privatizing and ownership initiatives will help reverse this.
The concerted effort of free nations to promote democracy is a prelude to our enemies' defeat.
I can just hear Europe (and the Democrats) hissing at this line. "Why must he always be so blunt?" etc. When the usual suspects hiss, it's a good thing.
Overall a good speech. I love Dubya's emphasis on freedom. I like knowing that he understands what makes America exceptional and great, and that he agrees with it.
Anyone notice that there was a lot of Sharansky in that speech! Good!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/1586482610/ref=dp_primary-product-display_0/102-5802718-7142545?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
Amen.
I liked the Day of Fire reference!
Great sppech.
I'll comment specifically later when I've the time, but this speech is historic.
Well Done Mr. President.
Which words would those be?
Dan
Looks like he forgot Poland.
Visionary, Lincolnesqe, hard for simple minded black hearted partisans to understand. A historical speech, and measureably so. I loved it.
Who could disagree with the stirring, elegant and somewhat sweeping address the president just gave? Well: here's a rough shot. The speech was a deep rebuke to conservative foreign policy realists. Its fundamental point, it seems to me, is that security is only possible through the expansion of liberty abroad. In the long run, that's indisputable. In the short run, there are sometimes trade-offs to be made. What Bush was saying was that he will not trade liberty for security. Translation: he will stick to the democratization of Iraq. That was the main point of the address on the major policy issue in front of us. In that sense, it was an old-style liberal speech, about as far from the conservative tradition in foreign policy as can be imagined. And at its most ambitious, it was a fusion of liberal internationalism with realism - saying that the latter cannot be secured without the former. It was ecumenical; and it was rightly thematic. If I could offer one criticism, I'd say it could have been shorter. There were times when the liberty theme became repetitive. And, of course, the relationship of rhetoric to reality is, as always with Bush, problematic. How do you reconcile the expansion of freedom with Bush's expansion of government? How do you square domestic freedom with the curtailment of civil liberties in a war on terror? How do you proclaim that America is a force for freeing dissidents, when the government now has unprecedented powers to detain anyone suspected of terror across the globe and subject them to coercive interrogation techniques that the government will not disclose? Perhaps these questions do not need to be answered in an inaugural address. But they linger in the air, even as Bush's eloquence and idealism lifts you up and gives you hope.
Unlike his father, he definately has the "Vision thing"!
All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.I thought it was an excellent speech, and laid down an impressive agenda...MUD
It was a great speech: visionary, philosophical, historically grounded. I think it will stand the test of time, and be studied and restudied many years from now.
Will we be able to have the freedom to, say, decide whether or not we want to wear a seatbelt?
Will we be free to choose our own toilets, or will we still be considered criminals for smuggling in Canadian units that actually work well?
Will motorcyclists be free to wear a helmet, or not, as they see fit?
Will residents of Washington D.C. (from whence emanated the big platitudes) be free to possess weapons to defend themselves from thugs dwelling in that hellhole? Or Chicago? Or New York City?
Will we be free to escape crooked Ponzi Schemes like Social Security entirely, or will we still be chained to a dying scam?
Will we be free to live our lives as we choose if we're not harming others?
But see, this is all the easy stuff by comparison. We could start with the easy stuff. Or not.
Oh, wait. He's talking about freedom for other countries. Never mind.