I agree with the President

[grinninfoole]

and yet, we are so very far apart. In his inaugural address yesterday, (as quote by the Boston Globe), Bush said the following:

"We have seen our vulnerability, and we have seen its deepest source," Bush said. "For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny -- prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder -- violence will gather and multiply in destructive force, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat."

I agree with this statement. Except I look at Bush's track record and I identify his ideology as one that feeds hatred and excuses murder. Listen up, shithead! Political power flows from the barrel of a gun, not freedom! Stop trying to achieve worthwhile goals with backasswards methods!

Comments

Fighting with dragons

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

I am actually frightened by this. It's either an example of breathtaking cynicism and boldface lies, or it's a formula for a very, very long war, one in which we'd best keep mind of Nietzche's warning that those who fight dragons too long become dragons themselves.

Clinton said some very similar things in his time in office, and it scared me then. I have visions of people I know dying in the sieges of Ashgabat or Harare if his rhetoric is something he is really going to put into action. (For what it's worth, Richard Perle and David Frum had similar talk in a book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400061946/qid=1106366715/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/103-4813264-6083045) whose title filled me with dread, given that it was rather utopian sounding, and I am a skeptic of utopian thinking.) I also suspect that, somewhere along the line, we'll turn into something else, something we won't like, and that the cost of smashing the petty tyrannies of the world may be greater than putting up with them.

If he isn't going to put it into action, he has just put out a lot of phony hope to people who are going to be bitterly dissappointed and resentful later on..just like Woodrow Wilson did. Heck, even some of Bush's rah-rah crowd is noticing that he sounds and acts a lot like Wilson (http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_01_16_corner-archive.asp#050667), and that conservatives should be worried by this.

As it is, I think you and Johnathan Hari (http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=553) are right. He doesn't actually mean it.

Of course, if does mean it, that scares me much more than if he is simply a cynical manipulator. Frum and Perle, in their book, made it plain that they think we should be picking a lot more fights. They actually think that crushing the ETA and IRA is a vital US national interest. I think that is a very dubious conclusion, and I really think that, given the problems we have, adding those neverending struggles to our plate is a bad idea.

Re: Fighting with dragons

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think he means it. And I agree that it's a cause worth fighting for. However, fighting isn't actually an effective way of achieving peace and freedom across the world. (It will work for an oppressed populace rising up against their oppressors, but, as we are discovering in Iraq, we can't invade and do it for other people. They have to do it themselves.) I think a cold war style approach, wherein we provide a vivid example of how great freedom is, so that the dictatorships erode from within, is the way to go. It can take decades, but it works.