Posted on 12/01/2006 8:17:53 AM PST by beyond the sea
We're going to need grace. We are going to need a great outbreak of grace to navigate the next difficult months.
America is turning against a war it supported, for the essential reason that no one is able to promise a believable path to a successful outcome, and Americans are a practical people. It is not true that Americans are historical romantics. They are patriots who, once committed, commit on all levels, including emotionally. But they don't wake up in the morning looking for new flags to follow over old cliffs. They want to pay the mortgage, protect their children, and try to be better parents in a jittery time. They are not isolationist. They want to help where they can, and feel called to support the poor and the sick wherever they are. They are also, still, American exceptionalists, meaning they believe the creation of America--the long journey across the sea, the genius cluster that invented the republic, the historic codifying of freedom--was providential, and good news not only for us but the world. "And the glow from that fire can truly light the world."
Much has been strained. We were all concussed by 9/11--we reeled--and came down where we came down. For the administration, extreme events prompted radical thinking. American exceptionalism was yesterday. They would be universalists, their operating style at once dreamy and aggressive: All men want the same thing, and we're giving it to them whether they want it or not. Now the dreamers hope to be saved by men--James Baker, Vernon Jordan--they once dismissed as cynics. And the two truest statements on Iraq are, still, Colin Powell's "You break it, you own it" and Pat Buchanan's "A constitution doesn't make a country, a country makes a constitution." Iraq has a constitution but not a country.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Americans are an ignorant, uncommitted, disengaged, poorly informed people. Sorry to say.
"Pat Buchanan's "A constitution doesn't make a country, a country makes a constitution." Iraq has a constitution but not a country."
Pretty nasty and wrong, Peggy. I know a great number of very wealthy people who have grace. You, Peggy, are talking about politicians.
And much of the public has a really, really poor memory. It's going to take more than mere grace to get us through this.
""That's not what I asked you" is a sentence straight from cable TV, from which many Americans are acquiring an attitude toward public and even private presentation." ---
Dear Peggy has a problem with the President saying to Webb, "That's not what I asked you." What do you think?
I like Peggy when she's not trying to craft a "We are the World" speech and pass it off as an opinion column.
I agree.
Now that I've finished reading this article completely and carefully, I wish I hadn't even posted it.
I think Peggy Noonan has lost any ability that she ever had.
No Peggy, as Mark Steyn keeps telling us, we need a stronger will to win and succeed in Iraq. Your brand of hand-wringing, "let's all behave ourselves and be nice" treacle is part of the reason everything is so muddled right now.
I hear you, and along those lines:
On Peggy --- "the fuzzy, day dreaming as a substitute for ruminating, fact free, speculative, opaque, pointless twilight zone" — Freeper Torie
****
"Howard Dean, that human helium balloon ever resistant to the gravity of mature judgment" --- 12/15/05
;-)
Sometimes Ms. Noonan is just plain silly. This is one of those times.
She's still good at turning a phrase, but when I get into her columns a little more deeply, I don't often agree with what she says. She's gone over to the dark side, I fear.
ps... headed to Scottsdale this weekend, taking the sticks. It'll beat the heck out of the 4 deg F we had here this morning.
The old theme song of Republicans in the minority. It seems 40 years of training springs back into place with very little prompting.
I only clicked on this to see what everyone else had to say, and I see from the comments that she continues in her predicatble pattern.
She struck out on three pitches, and looked at the tird stike.
I think she's reading something into the phrase that I didn't when I first read it. My interpretation was that Bush was making an attempt to be personable and more human with respect to Webb. But who knows, I'd have to hear the exchange to judge the vocal inflections.
I think...that Ms. Noonan is so fond of wordy, flowery phrases that she has no respect for straight-talking. She has taken other swipes at the President's way of speaking, at least one of them insinuating (in her usualy wordy, flowery manner of course) that he wasn't as intelligent as he should be. I don't recall the exact column, just remember reading it and thinking, she really hasn't a clue, has she?
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