Bush's Speech: A Sad Moment For America
Tue Jun 28, 2005 at 07:02:16 PM PDT
Cross-posted from
Moral Questions Weblog.
Before I read anything else, I wanted to give my take on the speech tonight. Here it is.
A sad moment. That's all I can describe Bush's speech as. Sad.
Throughout our nation's history, we have at times had statesmen as our leaders who were willing to rise above the partisanship and bickering, rise above their own arrogance and agendas, and explain things the way they needed to be explained to the American people, to level with them in a way that they can accept the way things are, accept what has happened, and sacrifice and soldier on. Sadly, tonight George Bush finally proved once and for all that he has never had the kind of vision and honesty that such a thing would require.
The simple fact is that we cannot withdraw from Iraq--I don't care what Moveon.org says. It would be a disaster both morally and strategically for America if we left Iraq now to descend into genocide and civil war, chaos and failed statehood. Therefore, responsible liberals face the galling prospect of attempting to prop up support for a war we opposed under the command of a proven incompetent. And if Bush had any interest at all in the future of our country and that of Iraq as opposed to just trying to win the next political battle, he would have spent this night reaching out to liberals and independents who opposed the war by acknowledging the truth of their critiques, instead of sending his henchmen out to insult us and farther divide the nation and, then, spend the evening going over an old reelection stump speech.
It was sad, but it was also predictable and phony. Will they ever cease politicizing the tragedy that struck us on 9/11? Of course not. Of course, he couldn't go 30 words before invoking that terrible day once again as the justification for his war of choice. I am absolutely disgusted. Disgusted.
And finally, George Bush's speech tonight was scary, because we can now reasonably assume that the next three years will be a wash for us--time we will never have again to deal with problems that are spiraling out of control.
There will be no mid-course correction from this administration. The tactics and approach to Iraq will not substantially change and we can expect it to be a breeding ground for terrorists and a source of resentment in the Arab world much like Israel for the next several years.
We will still approach national security from the old Cold War, defense contractor-enabled perspective. There will be no bold non-proliferation and intelligence apparatus created to deal with the true threats we face.
And at the crux of it all there is oil, and we can expect that as world oil production crests toward its peak, there will be no honest assessment of how we have harloted ourselves out for it and abuses less powerful countries over it and are now set to see our living standards begin a relative decline.
As for domestic politics, instead of solving Medicare's shortfall, we'll let it go over the edge just as the babyboomers are retiring. Instead, we can expect to go deeper in debt to fix a practically far-flung shortfall with Social Security.
And as opposed to working to keep people from financial disaster by creating a national health care system, we can expect the President to continue to line the pockets of oligarchs through corporate welfare and porkbarrel spending and maybe even a shiny new flat tax to shift most of the tax burden onto the middle class.
This is a sad, sad moment for America. Historians often write that when countries face challenges, a great leader usually will rise to the occasion. But not always.
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