The New York Times coverage of Bush’s speech at the Air Force Academy is a special treat. Like a complete idiot, I hurt my back doing dead lifts in my garage, and so spent a fair part of yesterday on my back in the family room, looking for entertainment on the tube, and caught W’s address. It was actually a very good speech, but poorly delivered. The Times puts it this way:
In a grim commencement speech on a sparkling morning at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, Mr. Bush outlined in the most detail yet what he sees as the continuing threat of terrorism. Rather than expressing any misgivings about the course of the war in Iraq, Mr. Bush emphatically affirmed his belief in striking enemies before they can strike first to protect Americans against Al Qaeda and other terrorist threats.
Giving a grim speech on a nice day? We can now add meteorological insensitivity to Bush’s many other style-crimes. “What he sees” as the continuing threat of terrorism? This is idiosyncratic? Maybe it’s not a threat anymore? And only the Times would think it was good journalism to add “[r]ather than expressing any misgivings about the course of the war in Iraq . . .” at the beginning of a sentence describing what the speech was about. I suppose we should be grateful that it did not read, “As car bombs exploded in Iraq, killing American soldiers and Iraqi children, the President . . . “
We do get this choice insight, however:
The president’s remarks appeared to try to strike a balance between frightening Americans and offering himself as the only choice to lead the nation out of danger and to shore up his credentials as commander in chief in an election year when polls show support for the Iraq war and his presidency declining.
Either that, or a sincere attempt to inform Americans about real threats facing them, and to do the graduates and their parents the dignity of acknowledging the danger he is responsible for sending them into. I watched the speech, and the Times fails to mention the standing ovation Bush received when he said, referring to the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war against terrorism, that he intended to take the fight to the enemy. The Times describes Bush’s speech as “interrupted intermittently by applause, most of it modest” and this is true. The applause was modest, except when it was enthusiastic.
The Times informs us that
Mr. Bush also tried to answer critics who say that his policies and the war in Iraq have simply created more terrorists.
But only tried, of course. The “we better not make the terrorists mad at us” argument is so compelling on its face that attempts to answer it are bound to be futile, but Bush did the best he could with his limited resources.
But the choicest passage is this:
Casting forward to his D-Day speech, Mr. Bush told the cadets that “on this day in 1944, General Eisenhower sat down at his headquarters in the English countryside and wrote out a message to the “Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces” who would soon be invading Normandy. Mr. Bush said Eisenhower wrote that “the eyes of the world are upon you” and “the hopes of prayers or liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.”
Mr. Bush omitted the first line of Eisenhower’s message, which was, “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months.”
The president used the word “crusade” once soon after the Sept. 11 attacks to describe the campaign against terrorism, and it was criticized in the Arab world for its association with the medieval struggle between Christians and Muslims.
I think we may be seeing the emergence of an exciting new doctrine of political correctness here. Not only may we not use words like Crusade, at least in the positive sense of a noble fight against a crazed ideology that wants to murder us, but, we should not use any language from a paragraph that includes such a verbotten word. As to whether D-Day was still a good thing, even though Ike called it a Crusade, I admit I cannot say. Perhaps the Times will clear that up for us some objective reporting at a later date.
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