Soviet-style Inaugural: Don't look at Pres or move

[Moses]

WASHINGTON

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Unusually tight security this time around

By JOAN LOWY
Scripps Howard News Service
January 10, 2005

WASHINGTON - The nation's 55th presidential inauguration, the first to be held since 9/11, will take place this month under perhaps the heaviest security of any in U.S. history.

Dozens of federal and local law enforcement agencies and military commands are planning what they describe as the heaviest possible security. Virtually everyone who gets within eyesight of the president either during the Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony at the U.S. Capitol or the inaugural parade down Pennsylvania Avenue later in the day will first go through a metal detector or receive a body pat-down.

Thousands of police officers and military personnel are being brought to Washington from around the country for the four-day event. Sharpshooters will be deployed on roofs, while bomb-sniffing dogs will work the streets. Electronic sensors will be used to detect chemical or biological weapons.

Anti-abortion protesters have been warned to leave their crosses at home. Parade performers will have security escorts to the bathroom, and they've been ordered not to look directly at President Bush or make any sudden movements while passing the reviewing stand.

"It's going to be very different from past inaugurals," said Contricia Sellers-Ford, spokeswoman for the U.S. Capitol Police, which is responsible for the Capitol and grounds. "A lot of the security differences will not be detected by the public - there will be a lot of behind the scenes implementation - but the public will definitely see more of a police presence."

The Department of Homeland Security has designated the inaugural a National Special Security Event under a protocol introduced by President Bill Clinton that calls for especially heavy security during events of national significance at which large numbers of government officials and dignitaries are present.

There have been 20 previously designated special security events, including Bush's first inaugural, last year's Democratic and Republican conventions, former President Ronald Reagan's funeral and the 2002 Super Bowl.

Under the protocol, the Secret Service takes the lead in drawing up the security plan, while the FBI gathers intelligence and the Federal Emergency Management Agency oversees response scenarios to possible terror attacks.

The Secret Service also works closely with the Defense Department, the National Park Service, and local police agencies, especially the Washington, D.C., police department and the Capitol police. About 40 agencies are involved.

The Joint Force Headquarters National Capital Region, which was created two years ago to bring coordination to the many disparate military units in the Washington area, will provide more than 4,000 troops to help.

Washington, D.C., police chief Charles Ramsey has sent invitations to police departments across the country inviting them to send squads of officers to help with inauguration security. The federal government is paying for officers' hotels, meals and air travel.

Several thousand officers are expected, Ramsey said. That includes squads from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, Bradenton, Fla., Charlotte and Greensboro, N.C., the North Carolina state highway patrol, several law enforcement agencies in Texas and other parts of the country.

"This is the first post 9/11 (inauguration) so obviously there are some more security concerns this time than in past years," Ramsey said.

The extra officers from around the country will free up Washington police officers so that they can form "mobile platoon civil disturbance units" to prevent protest demonstrations from getting out of hand, Ramsey said.

Groups planning demonstrations during the inauguration festivities are already smarting from security restrictions. Anti-war protesters with the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition have complained that large sections of the parade route have been set aside for Bush's political contributors and supporters and will be closed to the general public.

The anti-abortion Christian Defense Coalition, which is also planning a demonstration, has threatened to sue the government because the Secret Service recently added crosses to its list of objects that are banned from the parade route.

"I think it's censorship no matter how you look at it," said the Rev. Patrick Mahoney, director of the defense coalition.

Besides weapons, other items on the banned list include coolers, folding chairs, bicycles, pets, papier-mache objects, displays such as puppets, mock coffins, props, and "any items determined to be a potential safety hazard."

Parade performers said they also have been warned to expect unprecedented security.

"They've told us right out that it's going to be very, very tight," said Peter LaFlamme, executive director of the Spartans Drum and Bugle Corps in Nashua, N.H. LaFlamme said he has been receiving almost daily phone calls from inaugural organizers to apprise him of new security procedures.

Thousands of performers - marching bands, color guards, pompon dancers, hand bell-ringers, drill teams on horseback, and Civil War re-enactors - will be bused early in the morning to the Pentagon parking lot across the Potomac in Virginia. While performers disembark and go through metal detectors, bomb-sniffing dogs will search the buses.

Then everybody will get back on the buses for a trip to the National Mall, where they will spend most of the day in heavily guarded warming tents. Participants have been warned that they will not be allowed to leave the tents except to go to portable toilets accompanied by a security escort.

Other instructions given performers include a warning not to look directly at Bush while passing the presidential reviewing stand, not to look to either side and not to make any sudden movements.

"They want you to just look straight ahead," said Danielle Adam, co-director of the Mid American Pompon All Star Team from Michigan, which also performed in the 2001 inaugural parade.

"Last time we went security was really tight," Adam said. "This time we got almost like a book of things we needed to fill out beforehand."


On the Net: www.inaugural05.com/

---

(Reach Joan Lowy at lowyj(at)shns.com)

[reggie the dog]

They are afraid of people looking at Bush?
Perhaps it will not be Bush at all, perhaps he has people that look like him, you know doubles like Saddam had....
this is just f**ked up.

Perform at the ceramony but dont you dare look at the person the celebration is for.
I am really glad I do not live in the USA anymore

[Moses]

[Moses]

Hail to the Thief

[Moses]

CrAzY President, Crazy Nation

…instructions given performers include a warning not to look directly at Bush while passing the presidential reviewing stand, not to look to either side and not to make any sudden movements.” – Scripps Howard News Service report on Bush inaugural activities.

---

It is clear that George W. Bush is suffering from a terrible pathology, a sick paranoia. It has been pointed out by people who have known him and should have been noticed by anyone paying even a tiny bit of attention. What is less clear is that the whole nation is quickly catching up with his level of insanity.....

Perhaps it is time to stop criticizing Bush for his shortcomings and talk about the nation’s shortcomings too. It is fitting that he leads a nation completely unqualified to be a world leader in any way.

Two years after the nation was propagandized into occupying Iraq the Bushmen recently confessed, a little. “By the way, remember that WMD we warned you about? Well, forget we said anything. We didn’t see any so we aren’t looking anymore.” The public reaction was a far cry from what it should have been.

The same week that the Bushmen pleaded guilty to perjury regarding the need for war, the media chose to place their spotlight on the CBS National Guard memo debacle....

Instead of investigating how the United States Congress, the United Nations, and the American people were lied to about WMD, the press gleefully joined in the witch hunt. Thousands of Iraqis are dead because of lies, but the media and the public who follow them made a bigger issue about a true story told in a bad way. Madness ruled yet again.

A nation that threatens inaugural performers with arrest if they make one false move is of course descending into paranoia. First, we feared and hated the other. We were told that Arabs, Muslims, and all foreigners posed a threat to our safety. The paranoia justified the Department of Homeland Security takeover of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Now all foreigners entering the United States are photographed and fingerprinted like common criminals posing for mug shots.

Like every other human emotion, paranoia is contagious. It can be directed only at one group for so long. Eventually everyone becomes a suspect. Outgoing Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge has proposed that American passports require fingerprints. The suggestion came and went without comment from the vast majority of the public, following along like sheep, doing the emperor's bidding without question. That is a sure sign of insanity.

The coronation ceremony for the Mad King is emblematic of the times. The spectacle costs $40 million, most of it coming from large corporations. Media giants like General Electric (NBC) and Time Warner are among the contributors. Corporate media bias in favor of Bush is hardly surprising.

The paranoid king has turned his enthronement into a military operation but won’t reimburse the District of Columbia for the $11 million it will have to spend for security. The good Mayor, Anthony Williams, has protested a little bit. He protested a lot more when the City Council acted in the interests of their constituents and initially said no to the crazy idea of doling out corporate welfare for a useless baseball stadium.

The Mad Mayor threw a hissy fit and ran as fast as his little feet would carry him to the exalted studios of Fox news. He whined and complained that the pain in the neck council wouldn’t give him a blank check for his idiotic project. He even invoked the name of the Almighty:


”What's going to happen is I'm confident that God is a just God and an understanding God, and we will have baseball here. I do believe that.”


If the president is crazy it isn’t surprising that the mayor of the nation’s capital is not playing with the fullest of decks either.

The crazy monarch Bush will probably prevail in his effort to eviscerate Social Security. He and his minions have already begun the process of convincing Americans to act against their own self-interest. They will do this by telling outright lies and twisting already twisted emotions.

They will act like a consumer products company that sells soap or paper towels. They will convene focus groups in market research settings and find a way to convince Americans that a safety net for their old age is a bad thing and the enrichment of Wall Street at their expense is a good thing. Advertising campaigns always need tag lines to go along with them. What will it be for the end of social security? “Private accounts, I’m lovin’ it.” It is all quite mad.

In the old fairy tale two con men convinced a frightened populace to say that a naked emperor was wearing clothes. At the end of the tale a child spoke up and told the truth. If that story were written today the child would be sent to Guantanamo without being charged with a crime. Members of Congress would say that it was in the best interest of the nation. The people who sent him there would become the emperor’s top aides and the opposition would welcome them with open arms.

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Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in   Ms. Kimberley is a freelance writer living in New York City.  She can be reached via e-Mail at [e-mail]. You can read more of Ms. Kimberley's writings at freedomrider.blogspot.com/

[Moses]

Bush takes oath
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[Moses]

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[Moses]

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Thursday, January 20, 2005 · Last updated 8:50 p.m. PT

Cheney puts Iran at top of trouble list
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview hours before he and President Bush were sworn in for a second term, said Iran now tops the list of the world's potential trouble spots.

Iran is pursuing "a fairly robust new nuclear program" and "is a noted sponsor of terror," he said in an interview Thursday with syndicated radio host Don Imus.

"You look around the world at potential trouble spots, Iran is right at the top of the list," the vice president said.

Another concern, Cheney said, is the possibility of Israel making an initial military move if it became convinced Iran had significant nuclear capability.

"Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards," said Cheney, who appeared on the show with his wife, Lynne.

The Bush administration might seek U.N. sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program if necessary, Cheney said. The administration prefers to address the problem with diplomacy and doesn't want more war in the Middle East, he said.

On Monday, Bush reaffirmed his support for a diplomatic settlement of Iran's nuclear program but said, "I will never take any option off the table."

During her Senate confirmation hearings this week, Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice named Iran as one of six "outposts of tyranny" that would require close U.S. attention.

Iran repeatedly has denied allegations of a secret nuclear weapons programs, saying its nuclear activities are for peaceful energy purposes.

In the Inauguration Day interview, Cheney also said he overestimated the pace of Iraq's recovery from the U.S.-led invasion.

Asked to name his mistakes in planning the war in Iraq, Cheney said he had not anticipated how long it would take the Iraqis to begin running their own country. Not until after Saddam was ousted did the United States realize the extent of the Iraqi leader's brutality in putting down revolt in 1991, Cheney said.

"I think the hundreds of thousands of people, literally, that were slaughtered during that period of time, including anybody who had the gumption to stand up and challenge him, made the situation tougher than I would have thought," he said. "I would chalk that up as a miscalculation, where I thought things would have recovered more quickly."[?! ]

[Moses]

Jan. 21, 2005. 01:00 AM Bush's call to arms


The word freedom echoed like a clarion call through U.S. President George Bush's swearing-in address yesterday. He used it 27 times in a short speech, urging Americans to rally behind him in a far-reaching campaign to rid the world of tyranny, and to drain the swamp of terrorism.


The stakes could hardly be higher, Bush warned.

"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands," he said.

"So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world ...

"We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation," he said. "The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies."

Stirring sentiments, those.

They are calculated to strike a chord with millions of Americans who remain traumatized by 9/11's "day of fire," and to boost Bush's weak approval rating by retroactively legitimizing the Iraq war.

But for Prime Minister Paul Martin and other Western leaders, the call to arms signals rough seas ahead.

If Bush is serious, and not merely indulging in inaugural rhetoric, he has put the U.S. on another combative course in his second term. It comes after waging a legitimate defensive war in Afghanistan and a needless, pre-emptive one in Iraq in his first term.

An American bid to aggressively promote freedom would make a political enemy at least of Communist regimes like China and Vietnam, where people are not free to choose their leaders, and where democrats languish in jail, or worse.

It would put the U.S. offside with autocratic allies in the Middle East, including oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Jordan. It would also panic the regimes of North Korea, Iran and Syria. It could destabilize whole regions.

This is not what most Canadians and other U.S. allies hoped to hear from a president who has yet to find a way to deliver the freedom, peace, democracy and stability he promised to Afghanistan, much less Iraq, two countries not even mentioned in his speech.

Far from being shining examples of "Made-in-America" democracy, both risk becoming collapsed states, breeding grounds for more terror, unless Bush manages to turn things around before he quits office.

It is hard to quarrel with a U.S. president who presents himself as a champion of democracy, and human rights. And Bush did say the U.S. has no intention of imposing its style of government on others.

But if U.S. pressure plunges the Middle East or Asia deeper into crises before those in Afghanistan and Iraq are sorted out, Bush may multiply the very tyranny, anarchy and terror he hopes to stamp out.

There is wreckage to clean up, post 9/11. That should be the presidential priority in Bush's second term.

[Moses]

The Bush administration is in denial about its disastrous failure in Iraq[/b]

Robin Cook
The Guardian
Friday January 21, 2005

Inauguration does not do justice to the exuberant celebrations of this week. Coronation would come closer. Washington ended yesterday with nine official balls. The night before George Bush gave a new spin to the phrase moveable feast by fitting in three separate banquets. He then expended as much ordnance in peppering the sky over the Capitol with fireworks as would get his occupation forces in Iraq through a whole 24 hours.

The contrasts between this uninhibited triumphalism and the real world are as wide as the American continent. One visible contrast was provided by the demonstrators camping out on the streets to protest at such extravagant waste by an administration waging its own jihad on programmes against poverty on the grounds that the federal budget cannot afford welfare. Yesterday, Bush gave a new spin on welfare cuts by presenting them as progress to an ownership society. The thousands of wealthy donors to the campaign to re-elect the president who turned up at those dinners adore this concept of an ownership society in which they get hefty tax cuts paid for by the poor who get their budgets cuts.

Then there is the sharp contrast between the self-indulgent hubris of the festivity and the fragile political victory which it celebrated. Bush was re-elected by the smallest margin in 100 years of those presidents who won a second term. His approval ratings this week are the lowest ever plumbed by any president at the date of his inauguration. But among the balls, banquets and bangs there was not a hint of the humility that would be the essential starting point for a process of healing the deep political division of his nation. The message of the jubilations could not be clearer. He won another four years and was going to enjoy them, while the other side lost and was going to have to put up with it.

Lastly there is the biggest contrast of all between the smug complacency of the administration over its electoral victory and the disastrous military failure of its adventure in Iraq. Since George Bush was re-elected over 200 more US soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Each new day brings another 70 attacks on the occupation forces as the territory dominated by the insurgents expands and the area which the occupiers can safely patrol shrinks. This week a senior Kurdish leader, although a supporter of the occupation, admitted that for a lot of its citizens, "the Iraqi government exists only on television".

The lawless background to the forthcoming elections has imposed whole new dimensions to the concept of a secret ballot. Most of the candidates will remain a secret lest they are assassinated. Polling stations are kept secret by the authorities lest they are blown up before election day in a week's time.

Iraq was the flagship project of the Bush administration and has turned into its greatest disaster. Yesterday's jollities cannot conceal the brutal truth that they neither know how to make the occupation succeed nor how to end it without leaving an even worse position behind. And, God help us, thanks to the unshakeable loyalty of our prime minister, we are left trapped in Basra shamed by the latest pictures of prisoner abuse and dependent for any shift of strategy on decisions taken in Washington by an administration that has repeatedly ignored British advice since its first monumental blunder of disbanding the Iraqi army.

A successful search for a new strategy can only start with a recognition that the present strategy has comprehensively failed. But the Bush administration II that took office yesterday is stuffed with people who are in denial about the dire situation of their forces occupying Iraq. In the couple of months since election day, George Bush has promoted the very people who thought conquering Iraq was a good idea and eased out anyone with a record of worrying about the consequences. Thus Condoleezza Rice, who was author of the alarmist claim that Saddam could produce a mushroom cloud, replaces Colin Powell, who warned the president that if he broke Iraq he would own the process of putting it back together again.

Perhaps wisely, those who crafted yesterday's inauguration speech hit the erase button any time the word Iraq crept into the text. Sinai and the Temple Mount got walk-on parts to provide biblical flavouring, but no location of contemporary controversy in the region got a mention. The only hint in the speech that there might be a war going on was a reverential reference to the sacrifice and service of US troops. Piquantly, at this point the television cameras cut away to a shot of Dick Cheney looking suitably solemn, neatly reminding the informed viewer of the humbug of a president and vice-president thanking US troops for facing dangers in Iraq which they took care to avoid for themselves in Vietnam.

Not that Iraq was unusual in being left out of the script. There were no specifics about anything else, either. Instead, we were invited to drift along with a stream of generalities, untroubled by hard problems or real-world solutions. Freedom and liberty are universal values. The founding fathers of the US constitution, admirable though they may have been, do not hold patent rights over those concepts. They are embedded in the roots of the separate tradition of European social democracy and we must not let George Bush appropriate them to provide an ideological cover for his new imperialism.

Nor should we accept the implicit assumption of Bush's muscular foreign policy that freedom can be delivered from 38,000ft through the bomb doors. One of the rare passages of the speech when Bush appeared animated by his own text, rather than engaged in formal recitation, was when he saluted the declaration of independence and the sounding of the liberty bell. But those were celebrations of freedom from foreign dominance - not to put too fine a point on it, independence from the British. He needs to grasp that other nations are just as attached to freedom from foreign intervention, including domination by America.

The president and his speechwriters have yet to confront the tension between their rhetoric about freedom, which is universally popular, and their practice of projecting US firepower, which is resented in equal measure. That explains why, on the very day when the president set forward his mission to bring liberty to the world, a poll revealed that a large majority of its inhabitants believe that he will actually make it more dangerous. The first indication of whether they are right to worry will be whether the Bush administration mediate their differences with Iran through the state department or through the US air force.

[e-mail]


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005


Note: Robin Cook is the former Foreign Secretary of the UK, who resigned over Britain's decision to join the Americans in the attack on Iraq.

[Moses]

With policy of pre-emption, he's no moderate

Friday, January 21, 2005

BY JOHN FARMER
Star-Ledger Staff

With his assertive and unapologetic second inaugural address, President George W. Bush yesterday gave the back of his hand to much of world opinion.

Under fire in the Arab world, in Asia and even among allies in Western Europe for a foreign policy that has justified pre-emptive war in Iraq and Afghanistan and lately has made threatening gestures toward Iran, Bush offered no mea culpa or any hint he'll moderate his global aims in a second term.

ANALYSIS

Instead, his 17-minute speech, overwhelmingly devoted to the need to eradicate terrorism and spread freedom, promised more of the same. For America, he said, "the great objective" must be ending tyranny; "it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture ..."

And he made this sweeping commitment:

"All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

With that pledge, the son seemed to be taking pains not to repeat a mistake of the father. President George H.W. Bush offered no help to Iraqi Kurds and Shi'as when they rose against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War in 1991 and were brutally crushed.

Bush made a passing reference yesterday to European allies irritated by his go-it-alone foreign policy -- "we honor your friendship, we rely on your counsel, and we depend on your help." And he added that spreading freedom isn't primarily "the task of arms" and that America's mission is not to impose "our style of government on the unwilling."

But he signaled no significant change in the muscle-flexing foreign policy favored by his neo-conservative advisers in charge at the Pentagon.

The president's rhetoric yesterday rang with high purpose. But it also seemed a rhetoric of overreach for a country facing deepening budget deficits, a military stretched dangerously thin, skeptical allies, and spreading homefront sentiment that his Iraq mission may be a mistake.

Bush never mentioned Iraq. Indeed, he singled out no individual nations as oppressors. Nor did he stipulate whether his response to such offenders would take the form of military action, economic sanctions or political isolation. But it is likely to win a mixed reaction, at best, from friends as well as foes.

Popular opinion in Western Europe, even in Great Britain, Bush's principal ally in the Iraq campaign, has turned harshly against the president, some seeing him as a threat to world peace. In the nations of Eastern Europe, however, where memories of Soviet tyranny are still fresh, Bush's promise to defend freedom everywhere should get a more sympathetic reaction.

If applied uniformly, Bush's promise of an aggressive pursuit of freedom and democracy could pose a threat to regimes deemed friendly, or at least not openly hostile, and themselves threatened by Islamist insurgencies or other home-grown insurgencies -- Egypt, Spain, Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, among others. And how, or whether, he would apply it to a giant such as China went unspoken.

It was a speech that lacked the lyricism of some inaugurals -- John Kennedy's in1961 or Abraham Lincoln's second in 1865 -- but "it will be very memorable because of its large theme," according to Charles O. Jones, a presidential scholar affiliated with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. "It sets a tremendous responsibility for the United States," Jones added.

The speech underscores the extent to which the Bush presidency owes its sense of purpose to the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, said Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist and presidential scholar at the University of Texas in Austin. "It was born on that day of fire on 9/11," Buchanan said, and continues to shape the Bush agenda, even at home.

Noting that even Bush's brief mention of his domestic agenda and especially his advocacy of an "ownership society" was linked to his theme of "freedom," Buchanan said of Bush: "He has clothed even his domestic agenda in the legitimacy and empowerment he received on 9/11."

The question certain to arise following Bush's grand theme is whether he can achieve much of it with Washington's strained fiscal and military resources, and whether the American public would support a global effort that could involve costly military expansion.

"It's an incredibly ambitious goal," Buchanan said. "It's a warning to every tyrant in the world. He's telling tyrants everywhere he's going to be knocking on their door."

Jones believes that how Bush applies his anti-tyranny policy "will vary from one country to another." But regardless, Jones said, the speech stands out as Bush's ultimate response to the 9/11 tragedy. The deaths that day, he said, have given Bush "a mission" and his speech yesterday is meant as his "philosophical justification and explanation for his policy of pre-emption."





Copyright 2005 NJ.com. All Rights Reserved.

[Moses]

GLOBE EDITORIAL
Freedom's requirements
January 21, 2005

IN HIS second inaugural address, President Bush promised to expand the sphere of human freedom both at home and abroad. That is an impressive agenda, but it must be done with humility and respect for others. Otherwise it becomes an excuse to impose his administration's ideological agenda on Americans and citizens of other countries who do not define the word quite the way he does.
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"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,'' Bush said yesterday. By that criterion the United States would be justified in using armed force to overthrow tyrants everywhere as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bush was careful to add some qualifying phrases: ``This is not primarily the task of arms. . . . America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling.'' But he could demonstrate his sincerity by using diplomacy, not the threat of war, to improve relations with such countries as North Korea and Iran and to mend the alliances - strained by the Iraq war - that have sustained the realm of freedom since the 1940s.

"Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill and would be dishonorable to abandon,'' he said, apparently in reference to the war. ``By our efforts,'' he continued, ``we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men.'' What Bush didn't say was that the war has also kindled fierce anti-Americanism in the Middle East and an expanding insurgency in Iraq. His second term will be dominated by the need to withdraw from Iraq without leaving the country in chaos.

Bush's invocation of freedom provided an overarching theme for the speech and for his second term, but it is stretching his credibility to equate the overthrow of foreign tyranny with his plan to partially dismantle Social Security, as Bush did in his speech. "We will widen the ownership of homes and business, retirement savings and health insurance,'' he said, invoking the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt. By doing so, he said, "we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear.''

Roosevelt, who quickly built an alliance to defeat dictators far more dangerous than Bush will ever face, had a vastly different conception of government's role. In his second inaugural address in 1937, he said: "By using the new materials of social justice we have undertaken to erect on the old foundations a more enduring structure for the better use of future generations.'' Social Security succeeds because it is owned by no one individual but is a common responsibility of the American people.

As he seeks to expand freedom, Bush should not undermine the edifice of economic security that has served Americans well since Roosevelt's era, nor should he erode the national security that Roosevelt developed to provide an enduring bulwark of liberty and tolerance. <br>© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

[Moses]

The Daily Camera
 <br>
URL: www.dailycamera.com/bdc/editorials/article/0,1713,BDC_2489_3486068,00.html

Flight from realism

Bush address sets lofty goals, slights hard truths

January 21, 2005

Has the contrast between a president's rhetoric and his actions, between finely wrought phrases and messy realities, ever loomed larger than it did on Thursday in the second inaugural address of George W. Bush?

The president's address was a 2,000-word ode to liberty, and on that highly elevated level it succeeded. It was also a sweeping declaration of principle: Bush vowed to use the power of the United States to promote "freedom in all the world" as the surest path to peace.

The echo of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address could not have been accidental. In 1961, Kennedy proclaimed that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden ... to assure the survival and the success of liberty." On Thursday, Bush used similar words to make a slightly different point: "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends upon the success of liberty in other lands."

We have no argument with the general point, or with Bush's elaboration on the theme: "For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny — prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder — violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat," he said. The only force that can prevail over tyranny, is "the force of human freedom."

Well said. But even the finest phrases cannot lift an inaugural address above irrelevance if the president stubbornly refuses to descend into the real world.

In the greatest of all inaugural addresses, Abraham Lincoln did not hesitate to confront the horrors of the Civil War before he spoke the memorable lines, "With malice toward none, with charity for all." Bush, by contrast, steered carefully around the war that defines his presidency. His speech, with its 15 references to liberty and 27 to freedom, never mentioned and rarely alluded to Iraq, where the victory of freedom remains at best a distant hope. Iran and North Korea were nowhere in sight.

Too often, the grand idealism of the president's speech was also a flight from realism in foreign affairs. He did not dwell on the pitfalls of aggressive, overreaching internationalism — which John F. Kennedy's successors discovered to their everlasting regret. Nor did he attempt to reconcile the glaring contradictions in his own message.

Bush told the nation that "we will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people." How forcefully has that message been delivered to Saudi Arabia? Pakistan? Egypt?

He held up the United States as a nation in solidarity with dissidents under oppressive rule. How effectively can the Bush administration deliver that message when it asserts unprecedented power to detain suspected terrorists and interrogate them in ways that used to be called torture?

He called Americans to do "the unfinished work of freedom" at home. "In a world moving toward liberty," he said, "we are determined to show the meaning and the promise of liberty." How does the president square that objective with the restricting of civil liberties in the name of the global war on terrorism? How, indeed, does he square it with his own brand of conservatism, which has expanded the size and extended the reach of government?

"America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof," Bush said on Thursday. That proclamation will have real meaning only when the president speaks with candor, realism and a new willingness to learn from his administration's own tragic mistakes.

Copyright 2005, The Daily Camera. All Rights Reserved.

[Moses]

www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-inaugural21jan21,1,4959224.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials

EDITORIAL

No Country Left Behind

President Bush's speech was impressive, and also frightening to those who suspect that he really meant it.

January 21, 2005

President Bush stood at the apogee of his life Thursday, and he rose to the occasion. A small man (in our view), who became president through accident of birth and corruption of democracy, he has been legitimized by reelection, empowered by his party's control of all three branches of government and enlarged by history (in the form of 9/11). His second inaugural address was that of a large man indeed, eloquently weaving the big themes of his presidency and his life into a coherent philosophy and a bold vision of how he wants this country to spend the next four years.
To summarize: Having won the Cold War, the United States was on "sabbatical." Then, on the "day of fire" — Sept. 11, 2001 — America learns that it is vulnerable. The "deepest source" of our vulnerability is that "whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny." Therefore, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." Furthermore, all people are entitled to liberty because "they bear the image of the maker of heaven and Earth."
And "it is the policy of the United States" to promote democracy "in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."
Every president talks about America's sacred mission of promoting freedom, and Thursday's speech was peppered with caveats. But from the speech itself and the official spin around it, we are clearly supposed to understand that Bush means something new and more ambitious. And even — or especially — Bush's critics have learned to respect his determination to do what he says he'll do, however much it may contradict the advice of those critics, or reality.
We take this president at his word. And the words are startling.
Bush's counterpoint of freedom and tyranny sounds like Ronald Reagan's, but the underlying analysis is much more radical. The threat to the United States, in Bush's formulation, comes not from the tyrants themselves but from the victims of their tyranny, who are radicalized by oppression and turn their hatred toward these shores. During the Cold War, the United States often supported or promoted tyrannical regimes, as long as they were anti-communist. This was realpolitik—the cynical, Machiavellian approach adopted by presidents since Harry S. Truman signed off on the policy of containing communism.
Bush the Elder was a master practitioner of realpolitik, but the aspirations Bush the Younger declared Thursday are closer to those of Woodrow Wilson: freedom and human rights everywhere, actively promoted by the U.S., by diplomacy and leverage if possible but by war if necessary. And Bush's analysis sounds nearly Marxist, with its emphasis on the radicalizing effects of oppression. When he says that "common sense" dictates that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," he sounds like Jimmy Carter.
There are reasons to be impressed by Bush's new doctrine. There are also reasons to be very afraid. It would be good if this country's foreign policy more closely tracked our professed ideals. It would be disastrous if self-righteous hubris led us into bloody and hopeless crusades, caused us to do terrible things that mock the values we are supposed to be fighting for, alienated us from an unappreciative world and possibly brought home more of the terrorism our neo-idealism is intended to suppress. There is an illustration of all these risks close to hand. But the word "Iraq" did not cross the president's lips Thursday. He referred obliquely to the war there, only in order to say that our troops were fighting for "freedom" — which was not the main reason they were sent over.
Ironically, the dangers of self-righteous hubris in foreign policy were a theme of Bush's first presidential campaign, in 2000, when he called for humility in our global ambitions and pounded the Clinton-Gore administration for what was then called "nation-building." Bush and other Republicans specifically objected to the use of American troops to promote democratic values, as opposed to national security.
Not only does Bush now think otherwise — in the most sweeping terms — but he does not even acknowledge that there is a cost involved or another side to the argument. He makes it sound simple. Terrorism is bad, freedom is good. Coherence comes easier when you don't sweat the details.
For example: It's a lovely thought that freedom invariably saps the will to plant a car bomb. But is it true? When freedom and democracy came to the Balkans, people were liberated to do atrocious things to other people in the name of nationalist enthusiasms. In the Middle East, there is always danger that a "regime change" — by election, rebellion or invasion — will produce a theocracy rather than a democracy.
Bush, or his speechwriter, is not unaware of this, but the president does not brake for anomalies. Bush's rhetoric Thursday chased itself around in circles, declaring that America's goal — freedom and democracy, so that people can choose their own way — is not forcing people to adopt our way, which happens to be freedom and democracy.
In his brief discussion of domestic issues, Bush astonished again by endorsing a "broader definition of liberty" than the one in our founding documents. Bush's domestic agenda, in contrast to his foreign policy, is mostly a conventional Republican brew of tax cuts, deregulation and subsidies for undeserving businesses. But the language is more Democratic than today's Democrats. Liberty does not just mean freedom from government oppression. It means "economic independence," he said. This is civic religion as promulgated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his famous "Four Freedoms," but by no other president, Republican or Democrat, ever since.
In most other presidents, we would take all this talk with a grain of salt. But we suspect that Bush means it, which will make the next four years interesting, if nothing else.

[Moses]

Editorial
A perilous passage




It was an eloquent and perilous inaugural. The central idea, which the American people ought to think about, was that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."

Interests and beliefs are different. In 2000, President George W. Bush outlined a foreign policy based mostly on interests. That did not need to be thrown out on account of the 9/11 attacks, but it was.

"It is the policy of the United States," the president said yesterday, "to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

He has the ideals right. We favor freedom and democracy in every nation and culture that wants them — in Mexico and Spain, South Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other places. This is the hope of our hearts and, in a diffuse way, in our interest. But it is not "the urgent requirement of our nation's security."

In parts of his speech, Bush sounded like John Kennedy, who said at his inaugural, "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Everyone knew Kennedy was talking about Russia. That defined what Kennedy meant, and to define a thing is to limit it. We knew what the Cold War consisted of and when it was over. This war now could be endless.

In his speech, the president promised to "persistently clarify the choice" between liberty and oppression "before every ruler and every nation." That is a crusading doctrine. It does not admit humility or doubt. The president made reference to being collegial anddiplomatic, but the doctrine is neither. Followed consistently, it is impossible; it would stretch our blood and dollars too thin. Therefore it will be followed inconsistently.

It invites inconsistency at home. Liberty is a doctrine of constitutional rights, restrained government and the rule of law. Always, these values are compromised during war.

The current administration has asserted the right to treat prisoners in defiance of the Geneva Conventions and to hold citizens indefinitely without trial. It has proclaimed that the Constitution does not apply at Guantánamo Bay. A cynic might ask whether, having spread liberty to the world, we would have any of it left for ourselves.

We are not cynics about liberty and democracy. We are for them, for defending our own and for promoting them abroad when it is wise to do so. But we are not ready to say, "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."

That is a doctrine too permissive of war, and from this president we have had already one too many.