Posted on 12/01/2006 8:17:53 AM PST by beyond the sea
We're going to need grace. We are going to need a great outbreak of grace to navigate the next difficult months.
America is turning against a war it supported, for the essential reason that no one is able to promise a believable path to a successful outcome, and Americans are a practical people. It is not true that Americans are historical romantics. They are patriots who, once committed, commit on all levels, including emotionally. But they don't wake up in the morning looking for new flags to follow over old cliffs. They want to pay the mortgage, protect their children, and try to be better parents in a jittery time. They are not isolationist. They want to help where they can, and feel called to support the poor and the sick wherever they are. They are also, still, American exceptionalists, meaning they believe the creation of America--the long journey across the sea, the genius cluster that invented the republic, the historic codifying of freedom--was providential, and good news not only for us but the world. "And the glow from that fire can truly light the world."
Much has been strained. We were all concussed by 9/11--we reeled--and came down where we came down. For the administration, extreme events prompted radical thinking. American exceptionalism was yesterday. They would be universalists, their operating style at once dreamy and aggressive: All men want the same thing, and we're giving it to them whether they want it or not. Now the dreamers hope to be saved by men--James Baker, Vernon Jordan--they once dismissed as cynics. And the two truest statements on Iraq are, still, Colin Powell's "You break it, you own it" and Pat Buchanan's "A constitution doesn't make a country, a country makes a constitution." Iraq has a constitution but not a country.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Golf Clubs: Tiger Woods Launches New clubs at LA Air
Tiger Woods was on an airport runway in Los Angeles (Hawthorne Municipal Airport) on Tuesday hitting his new Niki Driver over 500 yards down the tarmac (the asphalt helped his drives).
The drivers - the SasQuatch Sumo Squared and the SasQuatch Sumo - feature a unique shape (square) and will be hitting the market in early 2007. Tigers take on the driver: "I've tested it, but I haven't quite found the launching conditions that work for me yet," Woods said. "The runway really helped my distance."
lol
I don't know about y'all but this is one old boy who's had it with make-nice platitudes and big tents.
What Republican conservatives need to do is kick ass and take names. For those that don't like that policy, "tough titty".
Again, Peg-O'-My-Heart, we're all really sorry for you that Bush didn't hire you for the speechwriting gig.
But it's kind of counterintutive to start writing boring drivel as revenge. Doesn't help your case.
:-)
She struck out on three pitches, and looked at the third strike.
It's useless without context and inflection.
The President could have been snarky and snippy, or he could have been compassionate when he said, "That isn't what I asked you". Just reading the text, it honestly sounds snippy to me in text. But, again, lack of context.
There is an interesting correspindence that still exists between him and a soldier whose attitude he perceived as defeatist and counterproductive.
Very true. We would need to hear it to understand Bush's intent. However, I have a hard time believing that he was being confrontational, as Peggy seems to think.
Agreed, context and inflection are essential. I expect I would have been snippy too given the past 6 years. Even so that wasn't my first thought when I read it. I guess it shows we hear what we want to hear when we read these things.
Peggy has been not been used by this White House, to my knowkledge, and I think it shows.
Agreed.
Really sad, isn't it? It's part of our microwave and television resolution society. Every thing should be resolved by the end of the hour of any TV show, unless it is a --horror of horrors-- a miniseries (which people sometimes cannot even bother to watch the second or third installment because it is too looooooong. (Which, incidentally, could be a big clue that we cannot stay committed to any one thing.) or hitting the popcorn button on the microwave because we don't have the patience to pop it ourselves, the old-fashioned way. How did we ever reheat leftovers before microwaves? I mean really. We demand instant gratification.
We have largely become a nation of pampered, pouffed, sound-bite driven, ungrateful, spoiled brats. I believe it is only a matter of time before we are knocked off our feet and driven to our knees. I really am frightened for this country that I love.
I assume you've read the letter he wrote to Horace Greeley when Greeley was slamming him every day in his paper.
No-nonsense pith, indeed. And yes, I recall Lincoln called Horace a rotten old shoe! Better not tell Peggy...
It is a parent's phrase. And Webb was acting like a child.
Peggy has now officially forgotten everything she "saw at the revolution".
R. Emmett Tyrell has a good piece on Webb's history of, er, eccentric behavior, dating back to his short tenure as Reagan's Sec. of the Navy.
This guy is a loose cannon of the worst sort, and I think history shows the President deserves the benefit of the doubt with respect to who turned that exchange in an unpleasant direction.
I found the choice of example (Webb versus Bush) to be interesting as a means of illustrating Noonan's point. Once again, she's found a way to make this Bush's problem, or at least used an example that she portrays as uniquely his fault, to illustrate her sense that we lack "grace".
That she dislikes Bush is hardly news. The extent to which she will stretch to make her antipathy for Mr. Bush clear is.
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