PRESTOPUNDIT -- "An intense brain-buzz, guaranteed" (2blowhards)

The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling .. A short and self-conscious preamble led quickly to the meat of the speech: the president's evolving thoughts on freedom in the world. Those thoughts seemed marked by deep moral seriousness and no moral modesty ..

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. There were moments of eloquence .. And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. "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.

Steven Greenhut, OC Register:

One can't help but think from President Bush's soaring inaugural rhetoric that he is building a broad justification for America as Globo-cop. The words sounded OK, but the implications were a bit frightening. This isn't conservatism as the world has long understood conservatism, which means having a healthy distrust for utopian schemes. The great Republican Sen. Robert A. Taft advocated a foreign policy based on limits and national defense, not on trying to remake the world in America's image.

I also hope that President Bush meant that he plans to implement something like the Reagan Doctrine to help oppressed people free themselves.

The President seems to have succumbed to the same failure as modern liberalism; namely, that man is perfectible provided those who rule us are allowed to act upon the desires of their "good hearts." It's Hillary Clinton's "It takes a village" crap with private retirement accounts and tax cuts.

There are reasons to be impressed by Bush's new doctrine. There are also reasons to be very afraid. It would be good if this country's foreign policy more closely tracked our professed ideals. It would be disastrous if self-righteous hubris led us into bloody and hopeless crusades, caused us to do terrible things that mock the values we are supposed to be fighting for, alienated us from an unappreciative world and possibly brought home more of the terrorism our neo-idealism is intended to suppress. There is an illustration of all these risks close to hand. But the word "Iraq" did not cross the president's lips Thursday. He referred obliquely to the war there, only in order to say that our troops were fighting for "freedom" � which was not the main reason they were sent over. Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack