GW's Inauguration Speech - Your thoughts

Ah, I've never been there.

Anyhow, I presume the State of the Union address is the more important one from the President?

A lot of things determine the degree of importance of a presidential speech including the content. I'm glad he said that it is absolutely not okay to have so many people living under tyranny. The president of the US ought to say things like that. It doesn't mean that we don't sometimes have to cooperate with dictators in the hard ball world of real politics. I wouldn't advocate suspending trade with China. However, it's good to state our contempt for dictatorship rather forcefully from time to time.

I see hypocrisy in the Bush speech - surprise, surprise!

China is one of America's largest bankers, giving large loans to the US treasury - yet it has appaling human rights abuses. It has been and continues to be tyrannical - ask Taiwan.

William Safire says it much better than I...

On his way out of the first Cabinet meeting after his re-election, President Bush gave his longtime chief speechwriter the theme for the second Inaugural Address: "I want this to be the freedom speech."

In the next month, the writer, Michael Gerson, had a heart attack. With two stents in his arteries, the recovering writer received a call from a president who was careful not to apply any deadline pressure. "I'm not calling to see if the inaugural speech is O.K.," Bush said. "I'm calling to see if the guy writing the inaugural speech is O.K."

Yesterday's strongly thematic address was indeed "the freedom speech." Not only did the words "freedom, free, liberty" appear 49 times, but the president used the world-watched occasion to expound his basic reason for the war and his vision of America's mission in the world.

I rate it among the top 5 of the 20 second-inaugurals in our history. Lincoln's profound sermon "with malice toward none" is incomparable, but Bush's second was better than Jefferson's mean-spirited pouting at "the artillery of the press."

In Bush's "second gathering" (Lincoln called it his "second appearing"), the Texan evoked J.F.K.'s "survival of liberty" phrase to convey his central message: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." Bush repeated that internationalist human-rights idea, with a slight change, in these words: "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

The change in emphasis was addressed to accommodationists who make "peace" and "the peace process" the No. 1 priority of foreign policy. Others of us - formerly known as hardliners, now called Wilsonian idealists - put freedom first, recalling that the U.S. has often had to go to war to gain and preserve it. Bush makes clear that it is human liberty, not peace, that takes precedence, and that it is tyrants who enslave peoples, start wars and provoke revolution. Thus, the spread of freedom is the prerequisite to world peace.

It takes guts to take on that peace-freedom priority so starkly. Bush, by retaliatory and pre-emptive decisions in his first term - and by his choice of words and his tall stance in this speech, and despite his unmodulated delivery - now drives his critics batty by exuding a buoyant confidence reminiscent of F.D.R. and Truman.

He promised to use America's influence "confidently in freedom's cause." He jabbed at today's Thomases: "Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty, though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt."

Bush has seen the enemy and it is not us. Nor is it only a group of nations (the "axis of evil"). Nor is the prime enemy the tactic of terrorism.

The president identified the enemy (and did not euphemize it, as Nixon's writers did, as "the adversary") a half-dozen times in this speech. The archenemy of freedom, now as ever, is tyranny.

That's thinking big, with history in mind. That comes from reading Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, and sends a message of hope to democrats jailed by despots in places like China, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabia. Bush embraced "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world," but added that our active encouragement of reform "is not primarily the task of arms."

That was also a reference to Iraq, where the greatest danger to postelection democracy is less from Zarqawi's terrorist murderers than from the legion of Baathists who want to re-impose Saddam's brand of tyranny.

A metaphorical nitpick: he said our liberation of millions lit "a fire in the minds of men ... and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world." I would have replaced "this untamed fire," which could be dangerous, with "the light from this fire," which would have illuminated the "darkest corner." (Once a speechwriter ...)

Evidence that Bush's "freedom speech" was tightly edited for time was in his concluding evocation of Philadelphia's Liberty Bell. Cut out of a near-final draft was the line on the side of the bell from Leviticus that rings out Bush's theme: "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof ..."

I find Bush's delivery to be uninspiring - he never seems to use a crescendo when he speaks.

Would you advocate cutting off diplomatic relations and trade with China and demanding that they become a democracy now? This is hardly practical. Anyone who says he hates tyranny has to cut off dimplomatic relations and trade with China? Bush's predecessors didn't do that, not even Carter, who talked a lot about human rights. The fact that you are dedicated to ridding the world of dictatorships doesn't mean that you don't have to live in the real world where some plans are workable and some are not.

What would be your reaction to...

It is the policy of the Soviet Union to seek and support the growth of socialistic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

or

It is the policy of the Iran to seek and support the growth of Islamic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

You are actually trying to argue that advocating the spread of democracy (the people choose their governments) is bad? That is frankly hysterical. You really ought to be ashamed. You really ought to also condemn Jefferson for declaring all dictatorships illegitimate and advocating their overthrow in the Declaration of Independence.

Before you start trying to shame mesquite, I'd like to point out that there is no argument in that post you quoted, only a question.

Oh, forgive me. I thought that he was trying to say that Bush's speach was improperly invasive in the internal affairs of dictatorships and likely to cause concern on their part. Silly me.

Yes. Silly.

Very silly.

(chorus, stage left) silly silly silly silly boy

The spread of freedom and liberty sounds good to me. However, as Blatham noted, the president avoided reference to real-world events. I wholeheartedly agree with Blatham's description of this as marketing. Marketing oneself and one's policies is not so uncommon that I would consider it sinister -- not at all. However, ideas untied from facts are the stuff of fantasy. A president may intend to accomplish the very goals that he defeats; his pure motives -- I assume the best -- do not redeem him. I'll start clapping when Bush aligns his ideology with empiricism; when he stops refusing to look at data that contradicts his theories; when he shows a willingness to debate methodology; when he starts speaking about facts and the real world. Perhaps then the "light of freedom" will emerge.

A pseudo-speech from a pseudo-president...
A Jim Jones is in the White House, babbling pulpit-oriented platitudes and rhetoric... as he and his faction promulgate a policy of War and death.
God help this great Nation.

*sniff* *sniff*

Anyone else smell that?

well no...it's your upper lip.....

It seems to me that now most people when they listen to bush speak about spreading democracy know it for the war talk it is based on his previous speeches and following actions and that is why it is scary.

Yes, yes, he's a warmonger for invading Afghanistan and Iraq, just like FDR was a warmonger for attacking the Axis powers. Bush was absolutely right to invade both countries, and both sets of citizens will now get to vote for the governments of their choice (although accomplishing that was not the primary reason for either invasion).

revel

My reading is somewhat different. I didn't see the speech as 'war talk'. I saw it as so ungrounded in reality that it can be used for just about any purpose at all...attacking Syria or Iran, or cutting and running from Iraq. The latter is, I wager, what they will do.

Blatham


Blatham, I agree with you. My immediate reaction to Bush's speech (written for him by a speech writer with facile wordsmith and vision talent Bush lacks) was that Bush had finally gone over the edge and was now officially bonkers.

While his lofty goals sound nice as rhetoric we all could agree with, and realizing Bush's compulsion to use military force (he is a life-long juvenile bully at heart) or to buy allies, one has to conclude that his speech was one given for historic legacy rather than his willingness to spend other people's lives and treasure to achieve.

Instead, in my opinion, Bush's legacy will be one of the worst president this nation has ever suffered. Our history will be the worse off for his strutting through the Whitehouse.

BBB