Bush's Moment

Last night, President Bush delivered what I believe was the greatest speech of his presidency. He has never been known as an eloquent speaker in the mold of Lincoln, Kennedy or Reagan, but last night, everything came together and he spoke marvelously. His points were interlaced, explained with great clarity and he didn’t slip up as he tends to when giving formal addresses. Bush is incapable of separating 9-11, the war on terror and the current struggle in Iraq into isolated, episodic events completely unrelated to one another in the way that his political opposition would like to see them. Politicians on the left go hysterical when Bush ties together the war in Iraq with the overall war on terror. “Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11!” “There were no weapons of mass destruction!” “The President is politicizing 9-11 for his own personal political aims!” Immediately after the speech, Senator Ted Kennedy lambasted the President. "The president should be ashamed of using a national day of mourning to commandeer the airwaves to give a speech that was designed not to unite the country and commemorate the fallen but to seek support for a war in Iraq that he has admitted had nothing to do with 9/11.” Last weekend Senator Rockefeller made the outrageous assertion that the United States would have been safer with Saddam still in power. I’d like this effete, Socialist-lite Senator to travel to Iraq and tell the legions of American soldiers that, according to his serious analysis, their efforts have been counterproductive and placed the nation at an even greater risk of harm. Part of the problem for Democrats is that they are so trapped inside a prism of moral relativism that they cannot see this struggle as one of good against evil. For them, everything comes down to political posturing and their quest to regain power. They have no effectual strategy in fighting terror. They are defined, as a movement, as an ideology, as a Party as one of opposition to Bush in everything. They foolishly cannot see that they allow themselves to be defined by running unanimously opposed to Bush on every front. Bush is secure enough with himself personally that he does not allow himself to be concerned with "image," polls or criticism that reflect negatively on him as a person and he does not allow these factors to dictate his policy decisions. I read a fascinating vignette by Byron York in the National Review. He relates a discussion between Bill Clinton and Dick Morris that reveals why Bill Clinton will never be considered a great president. Here’s an excerpt from the article.

In early August 1996, a few weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing, Clinton had a long conversation with Dick Morris about his place in history. Morris divided presidents into four categories: first tier, second tier, third tier, and the rest. Twenty-two presidents who presided over uneventful administrations fell into the last category. Just five — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt — made Morris’s first tier. Clinton asked Morris where he stood. “I said that at the moment he was at the top of the unrated category,” Morris recalls. Morris says he told the president that one surprising thing about the ratings was that a president’s standing had little to do with the performance of the economy during his time in office. “Yeah,” Clinton responded, “It has so much to do with whether you get re-elected or not, but history kind of forgets it." Clinton then asked, “What do I need to do to be first tier?” “I said, ‘You can’t,’“ Morris remembers. “‘You have to win a war.’“ Clinton then asked what he needed to do to make the second or third tier, and Morris outlined three goals. The first was successful welfare reform. The second was balancing the budget. And the third was an effective battle against terrorism. “I said the only one of the major goals he had not achieved was a war on terrorism,” Morris says. (This is not a recent recollection; Morris also described the conversation in his 1997 book, Behind the Oval Office.) But Clinton never began, much less finished, a war on terrorism. Even though Morris’s polling showed the poll-sensitive president that the American people supported tough action, Clinton demurred.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzhjODk1ODg4M2NiODU4Yzc3YWE1OTA1MDNmYWQ5M2Y=

In my view, Bush will be seen by history, as a great president because he had the chutzpah to take on terror with the military. Clinton and his entire Party are quite simply not equipped to engage in this struggle. The article sited above proves this convincingly. Every terror attack during the Clinton Administration, and there were many, was met with utter inaction that only served to embolden our enemy. Liberals have a fear of taking action coupled with a deep-seated cynicism of the military that borders, in my view, on a psychological complex worthy of the best-paid therapist money can buy. If you throw this in with their obsessive, narcissistic preoccupation with their own image that paralyses them from doing anything that involves risk and you have the recipe for a perfectly dysfunctional political Party.