It was a great speech.
Thanks for letting me know you liked the arrangement.
HEADS UP . . .
The President and First Lady will be featured guests at the "An American Celebration at Ford's Theatre: The July 4th Special" tonight on ABC -- 10 PM EDT.
http://abc.go.com/specials/americancelebration.html
FAVORITE QUOTE FROM THE PRESIDENT'S AWESOME SPEECH TODAY:
"A few weeks ago, I had a chance to visit Baghdad and visit with some of Fort Bragg's finest soldiers, the special operation forces who helped bring justice to the terrorist Zarqawi. (Applause.)
They were the first coalition forces to arrive on the scene after the bombing of Zarqawi's safe house. They administered compassionate medical care to a man who showed no compassion to his victims. And when this brutal terrorist took his final breath, one of the last things he saw was the face of an American soldier from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. (Applause.)"
You can watch a video of the speech (and other great videoclips) here:
http://www.wral.com/news/9464676/detail.html
MUST READ:
THIS JULY FOURTH, IGNORE POLLS ON AMERICA'S IMAGE
christopher Hitchens, The Examiner
Jul 4, 2006 2:00 AM (15 hrs ago)
Current rank: # 1 of 13,363 articles
WASHINGTON - Here’s what I want to know, and here’s why I want to know it. At what point in history, exactly, did the Pew Center decide that it knew how to measure world opinion?
I ask this because almost every week I seem to read a study of how the rest of the globe thinks (or at any rate feels) about the United States. The polls in this country are unreliable enough and are often used to measure intangibles, such as “approval ratings,” which is why there is so much fluctuation within and between them. But who’s doing the random samples in Somalia and Tajikistan and Ecuador?
. . . It also goes to show that you probably shouldn’t try. A country that attempted to be in everybody’s good books would be quite paralyzed. The last time everybody said they liked the United States (or said that they said they liked the United States) was just after Sept. 11, when the nation was panicked and traumatized and trying to count its dead. Well, no thanks. This is too high a price to be paid for being popular.
. . . Faced with a complete beast like the late Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been trying to kill us for several years, millions of Americans appear to believe that he only appeared in Iraq because in some way we made him upset. Well, even if this was true — which it is not — it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. (What would you say to a policy that made him contented, instead?).
Thus, for a Fourth of July message, I would suggest less masochism, more confidence on the American street, and less nervous reliance on paper majorities discovered by paper organizations.
Happy Independence Day.
You can read the entire commentary at
http://www.examiner.com/a-167318~Christopher_Hitchens__This_July_Fourth__ignore_polls_on_America_s_image.html