Hegemony mon amour

The only alternative to American leadership is a dramatically more dangerous and anxious world.

Yet we also choose to lead because it is a privilege to serve the values that gave us birth.

American leaders -- from Roosevelt, to Truman, to Kennedy, to Reagan -- rejected isolation and retreat because they knew that America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.

Our own generation is in a long war against a determined enemy, a war that will be fought by presidents of both parties who will need steady bipartisan support from the Congress.

And tonight I ask for yours. Together, let us protect our country, support the men and women who defend us, and lead this world toward freedom.

It's like we've been a broken-record bully ever since Woodrow Wilson collapsed under his authentic idealism, and I'm sure his ghost stared on in horror at the blank abstractions trotting out of Bush's teleprompter. The President spent the night soft-soaping the masses with silly domestic policy shell games, while angrying up our blood for an invented conflict that nobody wants. Democracy is good; why do arms manufacturers have to be deployed to bulldoze a path for it?

In any case, Woodrow Wilson's address to Congress is worth quoting, for contrast and comparison (you choose the nation that replaces "Germany" today):

In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong and assertions of right we feel ourselves to be intimate partners of all the governments and peoples associated together against the Imperialists. We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end. For such arrangements and covenants we are willing to fight and to continue to fight until they are achieved; but only because we wish the right to prevail and desire a just and stable peace such as can be secured only by removing the chief provocations to war, which this program does remove. We have no jealousy of German greatness, and there is nothing in this program that impairs it. We grudge her no achievement or distinction of learning or of pacific enterprise such as have made her record very bright and very enviable. We do not wish to injure her or to block in any way her legitimate influence or power. We do not wish to fight her either with arms or with hostile arrangements of trade if she is willing to associate herself with us and the other peace- loving nations of the world in covenants of justice and law and fair dealing. We wish her only to accept a place of equality among the peoples of the world, -- the new world in which we now live, -- instead of a place of mastery.