2006-11-20T20:03:00.000-08:00

A discussion of Michael Moore with a friend of a friend of a friend of Maze's led to this dude saying, "I don't think you really know how building a third-party constituency would help working families." It took every fiber in my being to not lose it. But I alway take the bait.

2006-09-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

What Is He Saying!? Count me squarely in the Peggy Noonan camp, a bit befuddled by President Bush's inaugural remarks yesterday.
I appreciate that he's a man of faith, obviously. I'm sympathetic to his resolve and clarity of thought. I'm largely receptive to his overall worldview and policies - with a few exceptions, of course - but on balance, I faithfully support this president.
But what in the world was he SAYING yesterday!? Ms. Noonan calls his remarks abstract, and I'd say in the extreme. She thinks he talked too much about God; I don't know if it was too much, but it was in service of obtusely flowery garble, so it did seem a bit arbitrary or, worse, compulsive.
I am an optimist; I love optimistic rhetoric, full of inspiration and uplift. But at some level, it needs to be based in reality, or it just becomes...well, rhetoric. Empty rhetoric. Empty, unintelligible rhetoric. And in this case, delivered by a spokesman who - let's be honest - we're never completely sure he has signed off on the words he's reading, because he's reading them like he's never seen them before in his life.
In the media age, communication matters. It is a constant source of disappointment that President Bush can't articulate his policies and positions better. I don't think he's dumb, and I don't think it means he shouldn't be President; I'll take a mangled tongue over slickly lying lips any day.
But the slow, deliberate, slightly anemic monotone that Bush uses to deliver speeches - he's settled into a sort of low-grade earnestness in key speeches, I've noticed...as if lethargy equals authority - is a distraction.
And, when the content is so mushy (albeit sunshiney), high minded, and vaguely other-worldly, it makes him seem a little...well, fuzzy. And because President Bush is so clearly NOT a fuzzy fellow, what a more notoriously unresolved speaker could pull off without injury to his image leaves our plain-talking, earth-bound Texan seeming...well...again, I hate to say it, but....slightly special.
Peggy Noonan, one of the best living speechwriters, says it best:
The president's speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him. God was invoked relentlessly. "The Author of Liberty." "God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind . . . the longing of the soul."
It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission. The United States, the speech said, has put the world on notice: Good governments that are just to their people are our friends, and those that are not are, essentially, not. We know the way: democracy. The president told every nondemocratic government in the world to shape up. "Success in our relations [with other governments] will require the decent treatment of their own people."
The speech did not deal with specifics--9/11, terrorism, particular alliances, Iraq. It was, instead, assertively abstract.
"We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." "Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self government. . . . Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time." "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world."
Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it's earth.
I think her observations are dead on. It's just a tad overreaching, the agenda. I agree with the principles, respond well to the basic convictions underlying the beliefs expressed, BUT...
Over the top, is how Peggy Noonan ultimately puts it:
"Renewed in our strength--tested, but not weary--we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom."
This is--how else to put it?--over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past "mission inebriation." A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts.
One wonders if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.
That's it, exactly. I don't despair - the State of the Union is coming up, and that will contain more meat and potatoes/specifics by definition. But I do lament that an opportunity was missed yesterday.
Red meat Christian conservatives - the ones who are convinced that THEY, and nobody else, got President Bush elected, and therefore he owes them to the exclusion of all other Americans' unique interests - will undoubtedly be thrilled, further convinced that the Bible-quoting Bush is THEIRS.
I admire him still, but am oh so clear that he, like all of us, is subject to errors in belief and judgment. And I'm thankful for grace.

luxariegrey