ninme

It’s been an incredibly lazy Sunday, and I feel like I need to post something, so here’s a rant I was working on yesterday, pared down to the basics.

What is wrong with everyone trying to figure out what Bush meant with his speech? For crying out loud, people! He meant what he said!

PowerLine has a note from Dafydd ab Hugh, who says it better than anyone else so far:

The new Bush call to liberty is not rash. It does not require we drop everything to march to the crusade, launching simultaneous attacks on Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Russia. Neither does it prohibit temporary alliances with tyrannies in order to defeat larger ones, as in World War II. But it does say that no longer will we acquiesce in another nation’s tyranny simply for our own convenience. We will not overturn elections, overthrow democracies, or even, by our money and our silence, encourage autocracies to crack down on their own people’s natural, godly desire for freedom. Appeasement is a tactic of weakness, and we are strong.

The thing that never fails to piss me off about this country is how flipping blinkered we are all the time. We get all whipped into a frenzy about the most mundane and ridiculous things. Social Security reform? You think anyone in ten years will even care? Maybe they’ll nod and say, yeah, it’s much better now, but you think it really means anything? Medicare reform? So what. Everyone is constantly wailing about how blind we are to the rest of the world, and then the President speaks to the rest of the world, and everyone is whining that he wasn’t talking to us. How utterly, utterly selfish. How completely beyond the pale, that anyone could possibly be insulted that he didn’t lay out the specifics of Tort Reform when he was trying to give the tired, poor, and huddled masses a glimpse of free breathing. The idea that the US is with them, and the message to Americans that it’s okay to be nervous about it, and it might take a long time, but in the end it will be better for everybody.

It seems to me that the only thing to discuss about that speech, which was crystal freaking clear, is how difficult a challenge it will be to do and then maintain, followed by perhaps a constructive and even productive (gasp!) conversation about human nature and the ability to keep brutal murdering thugs consistently out of governments.

Anyway, I had a lot more than that, and a bunch of other links, but never got around to making it coherent. So here’s the bits that work, plus a few extra rants interspersed throughout.