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Thank You Mr. President

by Christopher Chantrill
January 29, 2006 at 9:55 pm

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AS YOU DELIVER your State of the Union speech this week, Mr. President, and enter the sixth year of your presidency there is something I want to say. It is “Thank you, Mr. President.”

You have achieved three important things in the last five years, Mr. President, and that’s as good as it gets.

First of all, you have responded to the challenge of Islamic rich kid Usama bin Laden and his twisted observance of the Turkish defeat at the gates of Vienna on 9/11 back in 1683.

Secondly, you have put our American wealth-creation machine back on track after the scare of the Great Tech Bear Market of 2000 to 2003 when the NASDAQ declined by over 75 percent.

And now it looks as though you have ended the poisonous Bork era, the twenty years of shame in which liberal interest groups made sport of assassinating the characters of conservative Supreme Court nominees.

Three big things, Mr. President. They say that a president should limit himself to three big things for his time in office, else he will dissipate his energies on ephemera. That puts you in the home stretch already, you fortunate son.

In the matter of the War on Terror, especially in the moment of clarity after the Hamas win in the Palestinian elections, we can now begin to see the wisdom of the strategic moves you made in the months after 9/11. It is good that you have interjected our brave armed forces along the border between Sunni and Shia in Iraq, complicating the task of anyone trying to achieve Islamic strategic concentration.

Strictly speaking, our western team should not be at any disadvantage from the Islamicist gang, but you never know, especially now that we can see that appeasement is not just an accident of the 1930s but a recurrent temptation for many of our progressive friends. In the past it has taken courageous leadership to bring the appeasers to the moment of reality when the scales fell off their eyes. You have certainly done your part to bring this moment to pass in our times.

On economic policy you have proven to be a safe pair of hands pushing through, against the foolish resistance of Congress and the blind ignorance of the Democrats, the necessary income tax rate cuts that have put our great economy back on track and restored its animal spirits. At the moment of trial, three or four years ago, you avoided doing anything stupid and thus spared us any replay of the decade of misery that our grandparents suffered in the 1930s.

As of the time of writing it looks like the Alito nomination is over—bar shouting, as my grandfather used to say. For twenty years we conservatives have bridled and raged at the brutal borking of well qualified, honorable Republican judicial nominees. For twenty years, like Dorothy’s Aunt Em, we have wanted to tell the wicked Democratic witches what we thought of them, but because we are conservatives, we couldn’t. But now, with the successful nominations of Roberts and Alito, you have brought the Bork era to a close. This is a great moment in our nation’s history, because with your steadfast leadership you have ended a great injustice without breaking the peace.

It is sad, Mr. President, that during your administration our Democratic friends have seemed to be unable to accept defeat in good faith and with a good grace. One of the most important skills in conflict is to know how to conduct a retreat in good order. The Democrats are failing to do this, and their failure is worse than a crime, it is a blunder. But you have been determined since the start of your campaign for election in 2000 to restore dignity to the office of the presidency. As your assistant (http://www.radioblogger.com/archives/january06.html#001337) Karl Rove recently said: “This president treats the opposition with dignity and respect.” We thank you for that, Mr. President.

Many things have been said about you in the last five years, Mr. President, many foolish words and a few wise ones. But we who are your supporters want you to know, as we have anxiously observed you from year to year, that we understand how much you carry the troubles of the world on your shoulders. We understand that you can never crow, as your predecessor did, “I love this job!” Today, the job of the leader of the free world is too serious for that.

On behalf of all Americans, Mr. President, we wish you well in this critical year of 2006 as you work to keep Americans safe and prosperous, and work to realize your vision of an America that rewards responsibility with opportunity. We live and work in confidence that under your leadership the State of the Union is sound.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300—301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District


Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm


Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values


Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization


Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue


Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph


Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self


Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion


Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America


Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital


German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West


Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action


presented by Christopher Chantrill

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