I’ve been fascinated by the various reactions to Bush’s second inaugural, particularly from the right, where the opinions were hardly unanimous. But two conservative responses, from sycophantic supporters of Bush, stood out for me in their inanity.
First up is U.S. News & World Report’s Michael Barone, who wrote a column emphasizing Bush’s line: “By our efforts we have lit a fire, a fire in the minds of men.” It led Barone to lump Bush in — I’m not kidding — with Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.
Bush is routinely characterized as a conservative and castigated by political opponents as a reactionary. But in his second inaugural he revealed himself to be a revolutionary…. Washington established liberty in America, Lincoln extended liberty to the slaves, Bush means to spread liberty around the world.
[…]
Bush’s goals are ambitious, and he risks failure. But so did Lincoln and Roosevelt.
In his praise for the “we have lit a fire in the minds of men” line, Barone mentions that it comes from Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, a novel about a provincial town inspired by new revolutionary ideas. What Barone didn’t mention was that the line came from the book’s unsuccessful terrorists. I’m sure it was just an oversight.
Regardless, Barone seems to have missed the memo from the White House altogether. The point of the inaugural wasn’t revolutionary at all. By the Bush aides’ own admission, it was intended to help explain past decisions and was not supposed to indicate a change in American direction or policy at all. This wasn’t a call to arms to a new challenge for the world; it was a justification for launching a war under false pretenses.
Of course, Barone may have faced an early deadline for this week’s edition and may not have realized that the White House would cut him off at the knees. Tod Lindberg, however, can’t use that excuse.
Lindberg, a contributing editor to the conservative Weekly Standard a writer for the even-more-conservative Washington Times, wrote today that Bush’s critics are in “denial” over the sweeping significance of the president’s address last week.
[T]his speech, in which Mr. Bush laid out what he believes in and how he wants to lead, namely, away from tyranny in the direction of more freedom, was a hard one to be angry at. What are you supposed to say? “How dare he come out in favor of freedom.” So the main response from critics of all kinds has been to say, of course he doesn’t really mean it.
[…]
Go ask the freedom-fighters around the world if they thought Mr. Bush’s second inaugural address was nothing but boilerplate, with little promise of follow-up, signaling no shift in policy. They know better.
No, Lindberg should know better. It wasn’t Bush’s critics who were saying that the speech represented no shift in policy; it was the president’s own aides who rushed out to make sure everyone understood that it represented no shift in policy. Even Bush’s father went public to insist that a new shift in American priorities is “not what that speech is about.”
I’m left to assume, therefore, that Bush’s allies in the conservative media are so anxious to embrace him that they’ll even ignore White House denials in order to inflate and exaggerate the significance of the president’s words.
Ironic that guys like Lindberg say we’re in denial, isn’t it?