Onward St. George to great glory and the fall of man

I let the President's inaugural speech percolate in my head before commenting on it. I read it once, twice, three, four times. I read it on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The more I read it, the more uncomfortable I grow with it. The interesting thing to note is this: For the most part, I agree with the sentiment behind the speech. It is so deliberately idealistic and abstract that it is difficult not to agree with the general principles Bush outlined on Thursday. I would have really agreed with it if he had backed off about two-thirds of the God-talk. But in general, who doesn't agree with freedom? Who doesn't support ending tyranny in our world? Who doesn't support sunshine?

But this is George W. Bush talking. He's the President of the United States. Blood and money follow his words. When he gets a mouthful of God and Mission going, he's Joan of Bush, standing on a pillar in a glass house, holy sword pointed towards heaven in one hand, the other launching rocks. Then - Off to the ball. He is utterly disconnected from the reality of this policies.

Contrast William Langewiesche's Letter From Baghdad in this month's Atlantic Monthly with the idea that we are achieving our own security by "spreading freedom" in Iraq. It isn't that elections aren't good. Everybody supports elections and freedom. It is that when Bush says this:

America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.

It doesn't jibe with this:

There is more: faced with resistance, we have failed with both the carrot and the stick. Take the stick first. The mere presence of American troops may help prevent the outbreak of factional fighting, but the U.S. military is not a police force, and at no level of strength can it serve as one on Iraqi soil. The soldiers don't know the language, the culture, or the people, and they don't know who does know, or whom to trust. As measured by the personal risks they take they stay in the country too long, but in terms of understanding the human terrain they rotate out far too soon. Their mission amounts to driving around in armored vehicles from which visibility is poor, trying to protect themselves, and occasionally engaging in politically disastrous assaults on neighborhoods and towns.

And,

On the carrot side of the American intervention are the infrastructure projects­fixing the electrical grid, for instance, and providing for clean water and sewage treatment, and upgrading the hospitals (into which the growing numbers of casualties are now carried). These projects were supposed to promote stability and provide Iraqis with better lives. Billions of dollars have been poured into them through the device of open-ended "cost plus" contracts, by which companies (almost all of them large and American) are reimbursed for the cost of the work, however they define that work, with an additional fee on top. There is no incentive to run efficient or discreet operations­to tread lightly on Iraqi soil. Indeed, quite the opposite....

It is very interesting indeed that the President's father appeared in the Whitehouse briefing room today to tell the world that:

People "certainly ought to not read into [the speech] any arrogance on the part of the United States,"

Die-hard Bush supporter, Peggy Noonan, caught the same tone. Writing for the Opinion Journal" she articulates a feeling I have had for the last 4 years:

The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush's second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars.

And later,

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.

That's it exactly. Unfortunately, Ms. Noonan has yet to realize that the President's deficit of legitimate boundaries extends way beyond the preparation period for one speech. This quality is what makes him a true believer. A capitalist trotskyite, an idealogue of the greatest magnitude. Follow him at your peril and the peril of your children.