. . . before saying goodnight, I just want to share one informational item and one EXCELLENT article.
INFORMATIONAL ITEM
Bush to visit Fort Polk Tuesday
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1077803/posts?page=1 [The President needs to be with his troops -- and we need to vicariously share in this experience!!]
ARTICLE
By Paul Johnson
As the U.S. Presidential election gets under way, I find my admiration for George W. Bush rising. With voters focusing more closely on the economy, the temptation for the President is to follow suit. But Bush's State of the Union Address showed that he's determined to treat security as America's number one issue, and he is right. The U.S. and the world must be made safe from terrorism; otherwise growth is an illusion. Mr. Bush believes security and growth go together but that security must take priority.
History shows that the best political leaders are those who have a few central ideas that they push with all their will. I am thinking of Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) also belongs in that select company, as, I now believe, does George W. Bush.
I used to get angry when my French friends would dismiss Bush as a "Texas cowboy." I told them that Texas has better art galleries than France does--the Louvre being the sole exception--and that although Texas is only one state in the union it has more first-class universities than the entire country of France does. (Indeed, the French are just waking up to the plight of their higher education system. Recently a main story in Le Monde, "La Grande Misère des Universités Françaises," reported that in Shanghai Jiao Tong University's rankings of the world's 500 best universities the top university in France, Paris-VI, ranked only 65th, followed by Paris-XI at 72nd and Strasbourg at 102nd.)
Bush Is No Booby
Nowadays, however, I no longer get angry. I just laugh. The recent economic conference in Davos, Switzerland had the advanced nations effectively lining up behind U.S. leadership. It's clear where the balance of power now lies.
Nor am I impressed by American criticisms of Bush. The tell-all book of a former Cabinet member, tinged with bitterness because Bush fired him, declares the President a booby who has to have everything done for him. But lightweights often say such things about strong, silent men. Take George Washington, who was well described as "the supreme example of eternal taciturnity and enigmatic wisdom couched in stoic silence." Timothy Pickering, first a military aide and then a member of Washington's Administration, claimed that the great man often dozed off in Cabinet meetings; never read dispatches; wrote few, if any, of his own speeches; needed chalk marks on the floor to know where to stand in public; and was a semiliterate figurehead who had to be propped up by his staff.
Generations of historians and the publication of countless papers have shown how false Pickering's impression was. Even when Washington's speeches were written by the brilliant Alexander Hamilton, study of the early drafts has established that the key points always sprang from Washington himself.
Presidents whose verbalizing--or lack of it--does not fit into the average academic's idea of what constitutes intelligence have always been subjected to this kind of dismissive attack. I recall vividly that during his presidency Dwight D. Eisenhower was written off as a near-zombie who was always out playing golf while the real decisions were made by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and aides such as Sherman Adams.
This was all nonsense, of course. Ike deliberately cultivated the relaxed, golf-playing image, seeking to lower the political temperature during some of the hottest days of the Cold War. As Richard Nixon, Eisenhower's vice president for eight years and no mean judge of Presidents, told me, Eisenhower was "the most devious man I ever came across in politics." Presidential papers show that Secretary Dulles, when negotiating abroad, always had to get clearance from Ike for any decision of substance. Ike's phone logs prove he was often hard at work early in the morning, when even his press secretary believed he was still asleep. Research confirms that Eisenhower was the man in control and that his policies were his own.
Similar nonsense was written about Ronald Reagan, another man of numerous firm and clear ideas that were pursued with obstinate determination and huge amounts of willpower. Reagan's lack of formal education and his attachment to publications such as the Reader's Digest were enough to discredit him among academics and media folk who, at a superficial level, form the image of leaders.
But Reagan's record speaks for itself, as does the simple but profound wisdom on which it was based. The publication of his letters has demonstrated the admirable consistency of his views of the world--and of the interests of America and the West--over many decades, the ways in which those views were elaborated during his presidency and how they have stood the test of time.
Old Europe Stops Sneering
There is nothing flashy about George W. Bush. He does not play with words or use more of them than necessary. He has a few clear ideas, shared by most Americans, and the willpower to back them. With Bush, you know where you are and where you are heading. Hence, even in Old Europe, the sneers are dying down. Most sensible Europeans--not just those in England, who have always recognized Bush as a "sound type"--are beginning to admire Bush, and the prospect of his having a second term is increasingly welcomed as an assurance of stability and continuity.
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author, Lee Kuan Yew, senior minister of Singapore, and Ernesto Zedillo, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, former president of Mexico, in addition to Forbes Chairman Caspar W. Weinberger, rotate in writing this column. To see past Current Events columns, visit our Web site at www.forbes.com/currentevents.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/fo/20040212/bs_fo/fa9e3e5deebcd95bc2a07d8e838505f4