Finally, Back to that Inauguration
Bull Moose: Leave No Dissident Behind
Yes, it's true ... if we dawdle long enough, someone else comes along and makes your point without you having to do a thing. And so it is that Marshall Wittman has the closest thing to my own views on the whole inauguration fracas.
On the one hand, I can't think of the last time there's been an actual inauguration speech which demanded clarification the following day. I mean ... wow. That takes some doing.
And yet, even as my initial instincts were to point out the hypocrisy in Bush's own words, there's the stronger tug that makes one think "Well, if he's coming around to this point of view, great." Then, of course, the clarifications come out ... no substantive change in policy, we're told ... we won't be putting the clamps on Saudi Arabia because, well, freedom really isn't for everyone.
Most disconcerting has been the assertion that we won't dwell too much on how many dissidents an oppressive country frees. After all, we're told, they can just round up the same dissidents the next day. It's ironic, then, that Bush's latest nudge of inspiration on this matter comes from Natan Sharansky's latest book. Sharansky, you'll recall, was a Jewish Soviet dissident locked up for years. Ronald Reagan made a central point of Sharansky's internment to Gorbachev.
In the end ... it just amounts to grandstanding platitudes. David Adesnik has some historical perspective on how other Presidents have given the emphasis of democracy promotion similar treatment over time. There's a long history of grandstanding platitudes in inauguration speeches, to be sure. Just strikes me that this one is a bit more unusual in that the central premise of it is such a dishonest platitude itself. Hell, the day after, the meme of the day was pretty much "Nevermind."
Now, all that pessimism aside, I'll give one bit of credit where I think it's due about Bush's second inaugural. It looked beyond terrorism. At a time when many who didn't vote for Bush decry his use of fear to gin up support, this was a speech that looked beyond that, defining more of an end-state rather than framing the present era of war. That deserves some credit even if one does think the view of the map between here and that end-state are dizzyingly ill-defined at the moment.