Posted on 01/21/2005 4:52:47 AM PST by beaureguard
If you can believe this, President Bush's Inaugural speech is catching flack from some quarters, particularly American leftists and Euro-weenies, because he used the "F" word 27 times. This is an "F" word that is even more offensive to the left than the "F" word. Yup ... Bush said "Freedom" at least 27 times during the speech.
Evidently Bush didn't get the booklet of instructions for Presidents making State of the Union or Inaugural speeches. You're supposed to talk about security, not freedom. Bush was talking about spreading freedom around the world, and much of the world was having none of it.
What is the problem with freedom? I think that the biggest problem is that people realize that along with personal freedom comes personal responsibility. To be sure, Americans will say nice things about freedom ... right up until the time that personal responsibility rears its ugly head. Freedom of speech? Sure, that takes no real effort. Freedom of religion? No problem there. It doesn't really require you to actually do anything. Introduce responsibility and consequences for irresponsibility, and the love of freedom suddenly wanes.
I saw a good example of the limited American love affair with freedom yesterday on CNN. Three women from three generations were being interviewed; grandmother, mother and daughter. They were being questioned on President Bush's privatization plans for Social Security. The grandmother was against it. She said that this would be like the government teaching people to gamble. She equates investing in the stock market to gambling, and has decided that it is wrong. Let the government take your money, and then dole it out to you later. Not that's just fine.
The daughter was particularly troubling. On the one hand she said that she had no confidence at all that there were going to be any Social Security benefits for her when she reached retirement age, whatever that retirement age might be. On the other hand she said that she wasn't in favor of privatization because she didn't want to have to go to the trouble of making decisions on how her retirement money should be invested. She would just rather have the government do it for her.
More examples? They're not difficult to fine. Just go to the basic levels of our society. Should you be free to negotiate with an employer on the basis of salary? No ... we need a minimum wage. Should you be free to buy a health insurance policy that doesn't include pregnancy benefits? No .. the government stands in the way. Should you be free to chose who is going to come into your home and tell you what drapery fabric would look good with your throw pillows? No. The government tells you who you can and can't hire for that job. Do people complain? Do they protest? Not a bit. Just accept the government controls and regulations and move on.
There is another troubling aspect of our lost love for freedom. When freedom isn't cherished people are opposed to paying a price to make freedom secure. The United States is trying to introduce freedom into the heart of the tyrannical Arab World. As in the past, people are dying in the effort. Now we have people saying that it's peace, not freedom that matters. That might sound good until you realize that by "peace" they simply mean the absence of armed conflict. Tyranny? Fine. Not even the most basic of freedoms? No problem ... as long as there's peace. Today an astounding number of people, principally on the left, believe that peace without freedom is just fine, thank you very much.
I've been watching Inauguration and State of the Union speeches for years. I've read almost every State of the Union speech ever delivered. Over the decades there were some obvious changes. Take the word "democracy," for instance. You never saw that word in a State of the Union speech until sometime around the 1930's. The idea of "democracy" suddenly became popular when politicians sought to expand the power of the state beyond anything imagined by our Constitution. To do this they needed to cite the "will of the people." Majority rule moved the rule of law aside, and our modern "democracy" was born. Along with the arrival of the "D" word came disappearing references to freedom and more emphasis on security ... government provided security. George Bush's speech yesterday was a market difference from this trend. Too bad it fell on so many deaf and unwilling ears.
I am with the daughter...I dont know what the retirement age will be for my generation...it has already been raised 5 times or some such nonsense like that.....
otherwise, shes completely uninformed. I am not counting on there being a Social security when I am in my 30s, much less my 70s, so I am doing my own retirement investments instead of waiting on the government...
The problem is even a lot of conservatives expect the government to take care of them. Its hard to stop being a public entitlement junkie.
I think he did a fine job. He believes what he said.
Does anyone want an alledged eloquent speaker like Bill Clinton who really gets up in front of the world and completely lies and feeds us these lies and finally bores us to death because he won't shut up?
Not me.
Neal crystallizes it right there. Thanks for posting this!
I heard one "on scene" reporter yesterday, say that a democrat walked by her and quipped, "How many times did he say the 'freedom' in that speech"?
Yes, it's a nasty word and apparently left a bad taste in that dem's mouth.
All you need to know about the left's hatred for it.
Exactly
I thought that was a good point, too.
I was having a Freeper disagreement with a poster the other day who thought Saddam was just fine because there was "peace" in Iraq. The fact is, there is "peace" in any dictatorship, because any disagreement is met by the knock on the door in the middle of the night. Is this a situation in which most Americans would like to live, essentially just depending on the whim of a dictator, who may one day let you live and the next day decide that you are his enemy and must die?
And even if Americans believe that what happens to people thousands of miles away doesn't concern them, the fact is that dictatorships are never happy within their own borders. It is in the nature of a dictator to want more and more power, more and more control, more and more territory.
So the "peace" of a dictatorship is pretty illusory, and yes, it does represent a threat to us, or will at some point.
Very good point. Pres. Bush's speech brought to mind the scene from "Braveheart" when Wallace/Mel Gibson shouted "freedom" before being drawn and quartered, just as the liberals hope to do to Pres. Bush.
I have just resigned myself to the idea that I'll be working in some capacity on the day that I die. I'll leave my corporate job by around 65 or so, and I plan to live past 100. Maybe I'll whittle out hand-crafted items and sell them on eBay. And I'll have income from rental properties. I'm not depending on social security anyway.
Freedom = Leave me alone.
A good start would be upholding that constitutional thing that says only congress may write law. Next fire 90% of the bureaucrats. And then impeach a few thousand judges.
The problem is even a lot of conservatives expect the government to take care of them. Its hard to stop being a public entitlement junkie.
3 posted on 01/21/2005 4:55:27 AM PST by goldstategop (In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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Many of us want freedom from illegals flooding our country.
Freedom from illegals would make THIS country safer.
The so-called "jobs Americans dont want" could be given to the homeless. I went to a beauty shop in a good part of town, several hours later as I was leaving there on a bench was a homeless person. They are invading our lives and is a problem that has never been dealt with, but yet the illegals live in nice homes, drive new pickups, something very wrong with this picture!!
The homeless label has been assigned to the mentally ill and yes obviously there many that are, but there are some that are without jobs and would gladly take some of the jobs that are given to the illegals.
Let the Euroweenies suffer.
Ponder this my friend,,, Dubya snapped his fingers and $350 million appeared for the tsunami relief. He snapped his fingers a few years earlier and $3.5 Billion appeared for African Aids.
IOW, the money is there, but it keeps getting on a plane and flying away. We need to ground that plane for your generation to receive what you paid in.
Yet it is our very FREEDOM that gives these hippies the freedom to protest at the inauguration. In Husseins's Iraq there was NO FREEDOM to protest, yet Ramsey Clark is Hussein's lawyer - and Ramsey was out there yesterday loudly protesting against Bush and our FREEDOMS.
Hipocracy at its hightest!
In the dems case - HYPO CRAZY
>>There is another troubling aspect of our lost love for freedom.<<
There is more than one!
They defend the oppressors, and demonize the Liberators.
It is reflective of how their souls have been warped, their minds shaped by propaganda.
Sadly, for some, it is also reflective of the unwillingness to accept the responsibilities of freedom because it isn't often convenient. Those that do embrace it face contant struggle, that in the end liberates their spirits in a way those that accept limitations will never experience.
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