Posted on 01/28/2003 8:53:44 PM PST by Pokey78
AMBITION:I've been thinking in the few minutes before I sat down to write how to temper my admiration for the speech I just heard. So to get it out of the way: the domestic ambitions of this president strike me as immensely expensive and clearly liable to sadddle us with at least another decade of deficit spending.
But then I found myself - an unabashed small government supporter - putting some of those concerns aside.
Why? Because Bush is tapping into American ambition again, which is no small achievement. And because his domestic concerns seem to me motivated by a decency and a compassion I cannot but respect.
As someone with HIV, I listened to his words about AIDS and found my throat catching.
This is a Republican president, and yet he sees the extraordinary pain and anguish and death that this disease has caused and is still causing.
He made me question again my more pragmatic concerns about the feasibility of HIV treatment and prevention in Africa and shamed me into realizing I should be far more optimistic in the attempt to tackle this issue.
And when he spoke about addiction - a problem I also see all around me - I also felt a genuineness in his words that surprised me.
I shouldn't be surprised, of course. Bush was an addict. And he came this close to saying it.
But this aspect of the drug problem is one too many have either spoken about glibly or not spoken about at all. If we cannot end the idiotic "drug-war", we can at least expand treatment and care for the addicted.
I was also gratified and relieved by his proactive moves on the environment. A pro-growth, technologically-driven environmentalism should be a central plank of modern conservatism.
Bush went some way toward establishing that. He needs to do more.
But there was something else here - the glimmers of a real core of compassionate conservatism.
By mentioning the lonely elderly, or the AIDS orphan, and calling on us to get involved person by person, I felt morally led by a president in ways that I cannot recall in my lifetime.
I was particularly struck by the president's defense of the newly or prematurely born, and their right to be treated with dignity and compassion rather than with brutality.
So sue me for being moved. I was.
KENNEDY, REVIVED:And then the extraordinary transition to foreign affairs.
It was a brilliant rhetorical flourish to begin so quietly, almost intimately, and then to build resolve out of compassion.
He laid out the distinctions between the various despotisms in the axis of evil, calmly, clearly and persuasively. He did not strike me as in any sense eager for war.
But the case against Saddam is so overwhelming, so morally right, so strategically essential that the need for war, if necessary, was, to my mind, irrefutable.
So too was the attempt to show that, in these terrifying and bewildering times, we can still control our own destiny.
I respect those who worry about the unintended consequences of a war with Iraq. I understand those who are concerned about the precedent of a pre-emptive strike. I admire those who want clear empirical data before the grave decision of war.
But it seemed to me that the president effectively answered each of those worries. He should have mentioned the allies who are already on board - the Brits and Italians and Australians and Spaniards. But if his goal was to show resilience, patience and a moral grasp of America's current responsibility, then he accomplished it.
In many ways, this was a Kennedy-like speech, a speech a Democratic president could have made, if the Democratic Party hadn't fallen into such moral and strategic confusion.
Self-confident, convinced, as he should be, of the benign nature of America's role in the world, ambitious, and warm, it was a tour de force of big government conservatism, mixed with Cold War liberalism.
"THAT THAT DAY NEVER COMES":My highlights?
When Bush directly addressed the poor people of Iraq, he destroyed the media cant that mistakes a butcher for a people.
When he declared of the evil men of al Qaeda, that "one by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice," his message must have rung in the ears of those still longing, as I am, for the perpetrators of 9/11 to be captured or killed.
But his best passage was when he outlined the irrefutable logic that connects 9/11 with Saddam:
Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.
That's it, in a nutshell. It is not paranoid to fear this. It is responsible. And it is the president's job to be responsible.
He seemed to me to show the calm of someone with real faith - both in the justice of his cause and America's ability to see it through. Everything else is minor compared to this.
Everything.
Actually, he's asking us to do more than look at it, he's asking us to pay for it. And I am mildly more willing to pay for something that will benefit us, as a country, in the future. I'm not sure that AIDS in Africa falls into this category. I suspect that he's going after the women and black voters. But then I like to maintain a healthy cynicism. All in all, a great speech, but he did seem to dwell on this topic a bit more than necessary.
Look, its one thing to say that one factor in invading Iraq is to liberate the people there. It is another thing to say that we will try to save an entire continent from their own self-induced problems (yes, mitagated by the fact that they don't know any better)
They are innocent and do not deserve such a horriffic fate. This scurge needs to be tamed and I'm glad to see Bush jumping on it.
They had good reason to fear him. It's hard to tell people they're seeing an empty-headed, warmonger, when they're looking at a good and kind man who speaks clearly from his heart.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes the 'rats and the media to sink his numbers again.
You are not alone at all, as a matter of fact you are in some pretty awesome company...I'm with ya....LOL
I thought it was pure politics, and he was speaking from Karl Rove's talking points. It's easy to be compassionate when you're spending other people's money.
Will Bush dare to tell them "STOP SCREWING EACH OTHER'S ARSES DAMMIT!"
(Not arguing, just discussing)
Ha! This has got to be Point Number One in any education program.
As much as it's popularm among them to trumpet the AFRICAN part of African-American, they don't really care that much about Africa. There's not a lot of concerted charity effort towards Africa among them. They reverence a mythical Africa not the real one.
In Africa they do not have HIV testing. AIDS is diagnosed by a complex of symptoms. Therefore any disease usually caused by infection and malnutrition,would manifest the same symptoms generally identified with AIDS,that is wasting away.
As an African woman put it "no one dies of 'runny tummy' anymore,now everyone dies of AIDS". Yes,this has been quite a boon to social engineers.
It is utterly out of control in the 3rd world; soon it will be China's biggest problem. The Chinese government in utter denial and will soon pay for their ignorance.
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