I humbly disagree

Voltaire taught us that only a fool would value every word of a reputed writer. I guess that means it’s OK for me to disagree heartily with Peggy Noonan’s last two columns.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Ms. Noonan’s reactions to President Bush’s inaugural address — enough that I’m just now getting around to writing and posting my thoughts. But the delay has allowed me plenty of time to consider the ramifications of the president’s speech while doing some academic analysis of it. And as much as I hate to do so, I must say: Peggy Noonan is wrong about President Bush’s second inaugural.

There is an old joke that says engineers view the glass as neither half full nor half empty — it’s just twice as big as it needs to be. I won’t attempt to interpret Ms. Noonan’s words out of context, but I do submit that President Bush has decided to view the world from the positive frame of reference. In his mind’s eye, the world is but half full of democracy, and he intends to fill it up.

I simply cannot figure out what about this disturbs Ms. Noonan.

She wrote in her 21 Jan. column:

But he didn’t. The president set forth an aggressive and righteous agenda far beyond his next four years in the White House. He charged a path for freedom. Hey, if one has to have goals, they might as well be good ones.

Ms. Noonan shields her criticisms of President Bush’s speech behind the veil that “this is not heaven, it’s earth.” I certainly don’t think the president made such a mistake. He is a man of faith. He is a man of principles. And he is a man who does what he says. As fallible human beings, we must yearn for perfection, not near-perfection. I think that is what President Bush’s speech is all about.

I’m a believer in the notion that nothing is static — you’re either going up or going down. Life is a binary, and one must pull hard toward the top or plummet toward the bottom. President Bush isn’t interested in simply setting freedom on an upward course. He wants the ideal of liberty to be universal, to shine light in all the shadows where tyranny dwells.

In her most recent column, Ms. Noonan continues to rail on the president’s speech. I was mystified at the first missive, but the second one really blows me away. And it is clear that Ms. Noonan has faced a barrage of questions and speculation about her opinions of this speech. Certainly Rush Limbaugh’s listeners were left bewildered by her assessment.

“They forgot context,” Ms. Noonan writes. That, she says, was the president’s biggest mistake. “All speeches take place within a historical context, a time and place. A good speech acknowledges context often without even mentioning it.”

True. But the president didn’t leave much context to the imagination with this line: “And then came a day of fire.”

This nation is at war. Americans were attacked without warning, and President Bush declared then that regimes that harbored terrorists would be counted among this nation’s enemy. His thinking became the Bush Doctrine, and he believes American national security is vested in the spread of freedom around the globe.

I disagree, therefore, with a couple more of Ms. Noonan’s assertions. She wrote that this nation has not seen a truly remarkable inaugural address since 1961. That’s her opinion, but I disagree. And she asserts that President Bush’s second inaugural wasn’t poorly written, just “badly thought.” I take issue with that belief, too. President Bush’s words echoed the policy he has been embracing for four years. That’s a line of thinking I happen to appreciately greatly.