Matt Drudge has this excerpt from the Inaugural speech:
“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. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
“America has need of idealism and courage, because we have essential work at home — the unfinished work of American freedom. In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.”
If it is “common sense” to launch a worldwide crusade to create by force what took centuries of cultural and political evolution to produce in the West, then the commonsensical has become the nonsensical and we are truly living in Bizarro World.
You bet we have “essential work at home” — and each day we stay in Iraq this vital work is delayed. Each billion we lavish on reconstructing what we so wantonly destroyed is diverted away from productive investment. As for the “unfinished work of American freedom” — does George W. Bush, the single greatest threat to that freedom, really have no shame? Are words that meaningless to his speechwriters?
The President speaks of “a world moving toward liberty” as if it were as natural as the earth’s turning. But if the appeal of liberty is universal, as the President has contended, then why does it have to be imposed at gunpoint in Iraq? By intervening we only distort and perhaps even defeat what would happen naturally, albeit not immediately.
It doesn’t take “idealism and courage” to declare war against an already-devastated and militarily insignificant Third World country, where the average income is less than a shoeshine boy makes in the U.S. It does take a certain brazenness, however, to proclaim that you’re only doing it because you’re so courageous.
If the President is right and “the survival of liberty in America” depends on freedom’s fate in Zimbabwe and Belarus, then all is lost. If we cannot think of returning to the work of rolling back government power on the home front, or even returning to normalcy, without first liberating Borneo from its oppressors and delivering Ukraine from the grip of odious oligarchs, then we are doomed.
This hectoring ideologue, more dogmatic than any Trotskyite, would have us suffer the fate of Sisyphus — who was cursed by the gods and condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, only to see it fall back down as soon as he reached the top. Under such a regime as this, the “unfinished work of American freedom” is certain to stay unfinished.