[RAY]

Watching Bush last night and talking to Tony today inspired me to believe that this president just may drag Americans back into adulthood once again.

Here is hoping and praying this conversion comes to past.

[Zeroisanumber]

Whatever. America already had it's Horatio in the person of Abraham Lincoln, and it's Cincinnatus in the person of George Washington. While Bush is a good man, he is not as good as either of those two luminaries.

If there's any potential Horatio in this fight it's Gen. Petraeus, who, dispite the woeful mismanagement of the war in Iraq by his predecessors and superiors, looks like he might have the stones to pull this one out of the fire. And if he does, then we might be able to say that we have a leader that we don't deserve.

I'm also getting very tired of people hyping Iraq's importance to the US as a whole. Iraq is not Rome, Iraq is not Washington D.C., Iraq is not New York City. Failing there, we can and will fight elsewhere.

[agincourt1415]

Great Story, and George W Bush is the right man for the Job!

[marshmallow]

I don't have any issues with Bush as a human being, I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories about the man nor do I believe that he's up to no good. I believe he is an honest man doing a job to the best of his ability. Being a man, however, he is therefore fallible, as we all are and he will make mistakes. I believe he made one with the decision to invade Iraq and every passing day proves that.

I'm not a Democratic shill, nor a limp-wristed pacifist who habitually protests US military activity. I have no problem with our presence in Afghanistan, which in the form of its proxy al-Qaeda, attacked us. I'm a Catholic who believes in the teaching of his Church on the requirements for just war. I don't believe those conditions were fulfilled with respect to Iraq and the previous Pope, John Paul II didn't either, when he counseled against military action against that country. It's a shame we didn't listen to him because the situation in Iraq is deteriorating.

It's also unfortunate that this war is now overshadowing Bush's other achievements. The economy is picking up and he gave us two apparently conservative Supreme Court Justices but unless something miraculous happens soon, the war will be his legacy.

On a site like FR, it would be nice to be able to discuss Bush's shortcomings without screaming "Bushbot" or "Bush basher" at each other. A sycophantic praise of everything he does is as odious as its opposite, a visceral hatred of his every action which one sees on other web sites.

[Palladin]

A good History lesson.

[Exeter]

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods,
-Horatius by Thomas Babington Macaulay

[shield]

Wonderful...I always ck in to see what Dr. Wheeler has on his web site and found this column. I was going to post it at FR...did a search and found it had already been posted. Not long back...Wheeler was blasting Bush...which really depressed me. Then he was invited to the WH and meet with a number of conservatives there...most probably Tony Snow and Karl Rove...it caused a complete turn around in his attitude toward Bush. He's back and loves W... ;o)

[William Terrell]

But Horatio never worked to destroy his nation's boundries and swamp it with invaders from another country. Matter of a fact, considering what Horatio did in the story, Mr. Bush is the opposite.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

One of the truest sentences I've read recently:

He stood there alone and spoke eloquently to a Congress, to a nation, of spoiled brats.