quote: Did you not see what I said about the commentary below that comment?
Yes, and in my reply I was trying to say that you must not be used to “normal” media since you’re so used to left wing bias in the main stream!
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posted
Then you noticed: all they were doing was cheering for Bush and saying it was the best speech they'd ever heard, and taking pot shots at liberals. They weren't fair and unbaised. If they were fair and unbaised they would NOT have taken shots at liberals or conservatives. They would not have been going on and on about how great the speech was (unless it was really that great, but it wasn't), or at least they would have had two sides, one that loved the speech and one that didn't. But they were. That is heavy conservative bais.
posted
Gee…. It was the inaugural speech. Not really the time for hate mongering. And would have been praiseworthy no matter who won on FoxNews. Now, if you wanted your typical hate mongering I’m sure CNN and CBS would have been happy to obligate you. So I’ll stand by my point.
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*whisper* Again, guys, Jay is going to stand on his "points" as long as you engage him on them. Don't bother; he's not willing to have conversations on political topics.
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Whether or not it was a 'good' speech I'll not contest. Personally I did not like it, but I am not an expert on speeches. However, it most certainly was not "the greatest speech of our time". Sorry. But he doesn't compare to Kenedy, or Eisenhower, or FDR. Not even close. Whats more, is that there are people who are experts on speeches who are going to be saying that. If they wanted to give truely unbaised commentary you would need to have both sides. You may call it hate mongering, but the simple fact is: to be truely unbaised you have to either show no point of view, or show them all. They were doing neither. They showed a single point of view on the speech. Thus they are baised. Whats more is you say they aren't hate mongering when they are taking pot shots at specific liberals and liberals in general? That sounds like hate mongering to me.
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Jay, I came to Hatrack when I was 15 years old in 1996. I was quite the zealous crusader for my conservative political and religious beliefs.
What I've learned in my over 8 years here is that most of the people on the board, the conservatives and the liberals, are older than me, smarter than me, better educated than me, and normally know what the hell they're talking about. I've gained a lot of respect for them and now enjoy getting to discuss things with them, even though a lot of the time we disagree.
Please don't pigeonhole us. I would currently describe myself as a social conservative and a fiscal liberal. You can't align people with one side or the other. Please remember that part of being able to argue with passion here is the added responsibility of promising to listen with respect.
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quote: *whisper* Again, guys, Jay is going to stand on his "points" as long as you engage him on them. Don't bother; he's not willing to have conversations on political topics.
So Tom, you’d rather I change my stands? Flip flop? Oh yeah, I guess that is your party motto. I forgot. Silly me. Guess that is one reason for your uniformed unreasonable hatred of an honest President. I’m glad to stand by my points and not change my core values based on the political wind or whatever is popular at the moment. Leave that to the Clinton’s and I guess you too Tom! Would that mean that for us to have a conversation I have to change my way of thinking? How do you ever trust anyone if you base your conversations this way? Very interesting. I kind of thought we were having a conversation on this today. I apologize it hasn’t been enjoyable for you Tom. Oh well, I’m off to a Hash House Harrier Run in 20 degree weather. Fun fun fun.
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I think the liberal Mecca is Eugene, Oregon. At least, that's where people tell me they're praying towards five times a day.
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quote:He has nominated Hispanics (Miguel Estrada for federal court and Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General) over less-qualified candidates
Adam, you probably meant "more-qualified," but what you wrote was actually correct about Estrada. He was (and is) highly qualified to be an appellate court judge.
posted
Anyone else wondering if Jay = BC/JH with a different nick?
Oh, and:
quote:You misunderstand, Jay. Trolling does not consist solely of making up an imaginary position, although that's a more common modern usage nowadays. You can also troll by being completely honest but deliberately offensive with your comments, which is currently your approach.
*posts this again because it needed to be said* TomD
--j_k
[ January 20, 2005, 06:40 PM: Message edited by: James Tiberius Kirk ]
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I decided to wander around downtown DC today, I didn't feel like standing in the security line so I watched the anarchist group protest for awhile.
posted
Jay, that's very cool that you work on catching mistakes for NASA. I'm glad to hear NASA's working on a replacement for Hubble. Guess I haven't been keeping up with the space news like I should!
quote:An aside - my respect for CT, already embarassingly large, is growing by the minute
Chris, I hear it helps to take a cold shower.
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Eh. Anarchist groups depress me. To the extent free speech means anything, it is being outlawed. Too many people use anarchism as an excuse to ignore the law within them. If there is one action sillier than obeying the law for its own sake, it is breaking it. By the time they turn thirty-five, either they have sold out or permanently and semi-voluntarily exiled themselves to political and social irrelevance. The pig who takes bribes from any drug dealer rich enough is doing more good for the cause than any ten of them.
There is an alternative to the futile efforts of directly opposing the corrupt status quo. Build it up, but in such a way as to make it collapse under its own weight.
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quote:it is a pretty speech though... but really, when has an inaugural speech meant - well - anything?
Kennedy in 1961.
As an American, once again, Bush just gave me a free pass to relax. There was no personal call to duty. I don't even have to kill anybody, just sit back and consume and keep my mouth shut. The only thing I have to sacrifice is my dignity in countenancing any invasions he plans.
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I think you misinterpret a lot of the "opposition" Jay gets here. Do you believe that Jay is getting dogpiled because he is a conservative? When you say you "support" him, do you mean that you agree with his political views, or do you mean specifically that you find his behavior in the last two or three days acceptable/commendable? I am genuinely curious here--especially given your acknowledgment that you had not read all of this thread, or, I assume, all of Jay's recent posts.
Jay is clearly seeking to bait people, and seems to reserve a special antagonism toward Tom. Is this what you support about him?
-o-
Sara
Just so you know, when I posted about the interesting implications of this thread with regard to our informal definition of a landmark, I was not doing it to bash Jay or to assert that it was not a landmark. Rather, I was genuinely intrigued by what it seemed to me Jay had set out to do. I'm far from being as nice a person as I would like to be, and I am fairly intelligent, but I am not really all that clever--disengenuousness is not something you're likely to see from me. Whatever I say my point of view or my interest is is generally exactly what I mean.
-o-
::tries to follow Tom's advice::
Jay, is your work some sort of internship, or is it your full time career? It reminds me (in general terms only) of my work at Oak Ridge National Lab.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Thanks for the text of the speech...I am sure I could have found it somewhere had I cared to look, but it is nice to have it here at Hatrack.
As far as you beliefs, I don't think anyone here cares a bit about what you believe. I know I don't. A lot of us here have a lot of different views on thing, but we get along fine, most of the time.
We have traditions here at Hatrack, and the Landmark is an important one, so some people mistook what you meant, that is all.
So if everyone (or most of the people posting) see to be slamming you, perhaps it isn't your view that are to blame....
Just perhaps it is the sloppy logic, poor grammar, and argumentative language that you use. I hold some fairly conservative values, and some liberal one, and I think BOTH are necessary for the USA to thrive....and that if either one completely won we all would be screwed.
I am just glad that you are not the sole bastion of conservative strength, because if you were we would be in for an even worse ride that we currently are on now.
posted
Here's a really interesting analysis of the speech from the Weekly Standard:
quote:Just the Right Amount of God
"WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE political philosopher?" a group of Republican candidates were asked early in the 2000 race for president. And the frontrunner at the time, a Texas governor named George W. Bush, calmly answered, "Christ, because he changed my life."
Well. You could barely hear the other candidates' answers in the crash and clatter of overturned chairs as reporters scrambled to reach the phones and call in the story. Some commentators decided Bush was nakedly pandering to Evangelical voters in a Machiavellian ploy so bold that he should have said his favorite political philosopher was, um, Machiavelli.
Most of the nation's chatterers, however, decided that this wasn't the devious Bush but the stupid Bush. Couldn't he come up with the name of an actual philosopher? Plato had a scribble called the Republic, Aristotle managed to jot down a few notes on politics, and in the long years since the ancient Greeks there have been a few other philosophical types who've set out a thought or two on the political order. A little more study time--a little less fraternizing with his drinking buddies--and Bush might have heard their names while he was an undergraduate, even at Yale.
And then there was the mockery the candidate faced for his confusion of piety with philosophy. The holy name of Jesus doesn't have much purchase on people for whom "Christian" is mostly shorthand for "life-denying bigots who want to burn all the books they're too ignorant to read." Besides, from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible that Bush claims to follow manifests deep suspicion of the philosophical. The Lord will do "a marvelous work among this people, even a marvelous work and a wonder," as the prophet Isaiah put it, "for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid." If Bush understood the Book of Acts, he'd remember the Apostle Paul didn't have much success preaching the Resurrection to philosophers in Athens.
Bad theology, bad philosophy, and bad politics--this was the high-minded consensus at the time. The identification of Jesus as a life-changing political philosopher was either a stroke of electoral genius, or a mark of jaw-dropping feeblemindedness, or--well, that's always been the problem for Bush's opponents, hasn't it? "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot," John Kerry whined to his aides during the 2004 campaign, and George W. Bush still remains impenetrable to those who persist in seeing him as some impossible combination of Dr. Evil and Forrest Gump. Anyway, the consensus was that he didn't mean--couldn't mean--anything philosophical by his answer to a reporter's question.
Funny thing. On a cold, bright day in January 2005, with the sun off the snow crinkling his eyes, President Bush gave his second inaugural address. And it seems he did actually mean what he had said before. The speech was as clear an assertion of a particular Christian political philosophy as we're likely to hear in these latter days. "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom," the president declared. "Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul."
There's even a name for this kind of theistical philosophy. It's called natural law. An inaugural address, by its very national purpose, walks the tightrope between powerful abstractions and empty platitudes, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. "In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak," Bush said, and is that a truth or a truism? A wrenching call to greatness or a self-congratulatory pat on the back?
A little of both, no doubt. But the most interesting things in Bush's inaugural rhetoric are the moments where justifications are offered for the various truths and truisms. The chain of explanation in his speech is always the logical progression of the natural-law argument. "Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals," Bush insisted. And why? Because there is, in fact, a universal human nature: "Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul." If "across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government," the reason must reside in the enduring essence of human beings as simultaneously corruptible and morally valuable: "Because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave."
As it happens, a natural-law explanation carries philosophical reasoning a step beyond the mere assertion of a nature for human beings. The problem for ethics is always how to match empirical and logical claims ("Humans want to be free") with moral claims ("Humans should be free"). And, within philosophy, natural law is a way of bridging the gap by asserting a unity of fact and value--based on the endowment of human nature with moral worth by the model on which humans are based. "From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value," as President Bush explained. And the reason? Well, "because they bear the image of the Maker of heaven and earth."
Now, any philosopher would point out that this is possible only if the moral law itself is real: a set of eternal truths that vary not in content but only in application as the temporal order changes. And, sure enough, there the necessary postulate is in Bush's speech: "Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before--ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever."
And watch it all come together as Bush reaches toward his peroration in the speech's penultimate moment: "When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner 'Freedom Now'--they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty."
So, we've got an enduring and universal human nature ("ancient hope"). We've got final causation ("meant to be fulfilled"). We've got a moral problematic (the "ebb and flow of justice"). We've got intelligible formal causes (the ideal of "liberty" as shaping a "visible direction" for history). And we've even got a prime mover ("the Author of Liberty"). There isn't much more a natural-law philosopher could want in an American president's inaugural address about nature and nature's God. I'd guess not a lot of gloating is allowed around the throne of the Maker of heaven and earth, but somewhere in the vicinity, St. Thomas Aquinas must be smiling.
BUT IN CERTAIN SUBLUNARY REALMS, there are others who are not smiling at all. "Way Too Much God" ran the headline in the Wall Street Journal, over a column in which former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan bemoaned the president's triumphalist religiosity. The speech concerned Bush's "evolving thoughts on freedom in the world," Noonan observed. And "those thoughts seemed marked by deep moral seriousness and no moral modesty." She had in mind, of course, the curious humility and even melancholy of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address--as well she ought, for Lincoln remains the high-water mark of presidential rhetoric, and Bush's speech was clearly striving at points to echo its unmatchable predecessor.
And if a solid Republican like Peggy Noonan is bothered by the president's God-besotted, un-Lincolnian immodesty, you can imagine what the reaction was among the president's detractors. But what's missed by all those who unfairly compare Bush's zeal with Lincoln's call to humility is, in part, the timing of the latter, for the end of the Civil War was at hand by the time Lincoln spoke, while we are still in the thick of the struggle Bush describes. Even more, there is a hard edge of determination for victory that runs through Lincoln's speech--a steel in his sadness that gives a hidden force to his demand for national humility. The 1865 inaugural address was not the breast-beating some read in it today.
Perhaps that's why Abraham Lincoln delivered the most theological presidential speech ever given. It is our great national sermon. "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"
In this sense, Bush's speech in the Washington snow isn't theological at all. This is not Christ the sacrificial lamb, or Christ the New Adam who breaks the curse of Original Sin. This is rather Christ the philosopher--and George W. Bush has just delivered the most purely philosophical address in the history of America's inaugurations.
As it happens, the natural-law philosophy the speech asserted has a little bit to bother everyone in it. The president's Evangelical supporters may have been reassured by the public religiosity of the occasion--the prayers, the Navy choir singing "God of Our Fathers," the bowed heads. But the god of the philosophers ain't much of a god to be going home with. A deistical clockmaker, an impersonal prime mover, a demiurge instead of a redeemer: This is hardly the faith Christian Americans imagine the president shares with them. There was not a mention of the Divine in Bush's speech that Thomas Jefferson couldn't have uttered.
Still, all that God-talk--all that natural-law reasoning--was heading somewhere in Bush's speech, and the president's cultured despisers, those who tremble or rage at any trace of divinity in public, are right to be afraid. Just not for the reason they think. It would take an act of perverse will to suppose that the 2005 inaugural address signaled the onset of a Christian theocracy in America. Every rhetorical gesture toward God was either universalized up into a sectless abstraction ("Author of Liberty"? Which faith group can't say that?) or spread down in careful pluralistic specificity ("the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people").
No, President Bush's opponents should be afraid of this speech because it signals the emergence of a single coherent philosophy within the conservative movement. Natural-law reasoning about the national moral character gradually disappeared from America in the generations after the Founding Fathers, squeezed out between a triumphant emotive liberalism, on the one side, and a defensive emotive Evangelicalism, on the other. Preserved mostly by the Catholics, natural law made its return to public discourse primarily through the effort to find a nontheological ground for opposition to abortion. And now, three decades after Roe v. Wade, it is simply the way conservatives talk--about everything. With his inaugural address, President Bush has just delivered a foreign-policy discourse that relies entirely on classical concepts of natural law, and, agreeing or not, everybody in America understood what he was talking about.
In other words, the argument over abortion changed the way the nation speaks of every moral issue. "We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: 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," the president declares--and thereby carries natural law out to the world.
This is a claim about the universal, which the old foreign-policy realists rejected. This is a claim about the moral, which the libertarians despised. And this is a claim about the eternal, which the Social Darwinists renounced. But these older strains of conservatism have lost the battle to set the nation's rhetoric. They are welcome to come along for the ride, but George W. Bush announced, there in the bright cold of a Washington January, that the nation would be moving to the beat of a different political philosophy.
Turns out he really did mean what he said five years ago.
Joseph Bottum is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard.
posted
"Turns out he really did mean what he said five years ago."
Except that thinking there are moral absolutes justified by an eternal God does not necessarily mean that Jesus is your favorite philosopher. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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And the idea that following Jesus as a political philosopher would lead you to a natural law philosophy is laughable.
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