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.
Although I appreciate your making the point that the epidemic could be exaggerated for certain nefarious purposes, I feel quite certain that it is still an epidemic. Given the problem, some distortion of the actual facts shouldn't obscure the question of whether we should do anything about it. Or how much we should do about it. Or whether it should be our chief concern on that continent. None of these questions are as clear to me as they seem to be to our president.
I would rather have you fill me in. How are they being infected? Rape? Blood transfusion? Born to infected parents?
(I am not trying to be argumentative here)
It seems more like you're the one who's obsessed.
But just for the heck of it,where are the events celebrating the amazing conquering of dysentery,malaria,various infectious disease,tuberculosis and malnutrition? Shouldn't someone have been awarded a Nobel prize for eliminating these scourges?Think of the mortality rates if they had not been wiped out since AIDS,which now kills so many hasn't made a whit of difference.I'd have thought it would have doubled at least.
And,I have another question,this "freedom" that God gave us,does that mean we are "free" to work for outselves and /or anyone who will hire us,so that government can take the money we earn and apply it to what they think is important and "free" us from making those hard decisions?
Contrast with any Democrat approach where divisivness is the cornerstone of any political argument.
. . .Juan Williams; hardly a Bush fan, when on Fox tonight with Brit, Fred and Mort. . .was almost teary in his appreciation of GW's inclusiveness as offered in his 'State of the Union' speech.
Juan offered the most complimentary analysis of any of them.
I am more sanguine about the environmental proposals. While I tend to think that private industry by itself can handle technology advances, I also know that the space program was a pie-in-the-sky goal that led to countless innovations that may not have come so quickly had there not been that government program. And conserving the environment should be a goal of conservatives; we can't allow ourselves to confuse our enemies and their real goal (the destruction of capitalism and production) with their stated goal (environmentalism). Conservative resistance to environmental proposals have been historically because environmental proposals tend to be anti-business. When they aren't, we should embrace them.
As I see it, here is how it unfolds:
Liberals like Ted Kennedy, are self-righteous sinners who feel good about themselves because they are do-gooders. In fact, this is the essence of liberalism.But does this mean that we shouldn't do good?Of course, when you look carefully at their moral positions, the self-deceived liberals are the guys who invariably take the wrong moral positions on just about everything.
This is because they are not moral people after all. They are merely self-deceived do-gooders. As Ann Coulter has said, "Liberals aren't just misinformed. They are evil."
This creates a situation in which the very do-goodism on the part of liberals is evil because it is rooted in evil. Not suprisingly, the liberals do wind up going overboard trying to create a PC climate in which the homosexual lifestyle is regarded as morally okay in every way.
No. The fact that the liberals pervert things shouldn't deter us from doing good things. So, I think we should spend the money to help the AIDS victims.
In a truly free society there would be no taking of money. But we have allowed our government this luxury and, since we elected them, we are at the mercy of our representatives (in so far as they get to decide how our money is to be spent) until the next election.
If I thought the money would be well spent, we might as well spend it to ease someone's suffering. I doubt it will work and, like every other failed social program, its proponents will say they just need more money.
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