SwiftVets.com

[shawa]

WOW! Outstanding analysis of President Bush's Inaugural Address!
I have had a great interest in Natural Law philosophy ever since I watched
Robert Bork being grilled by the Judiciary Committee. The LIBS
anathema toward Natural Law philosophy sparked my interest.
They seemed to be frightened by it, and ultimately Bork's nomination
was defeated.

I have a file labeled "This Is A Keeper" in which I collect articles and
commentaries that I find to be especially outstanding.
This commentary will go right to the top.
IT IS A KEEPER!

Just the Right Amount of God
From the January 31, 2005 issue: George Bush delivers the most philosophical inaugural address ever.
by Joseph Bottum
01/31/2005, Volume 010, Issue 19

"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......


http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=5171&R=C3CA14AA9

[GenrXr]

Thanks for sharing this article with us Shawa.

I absolutely love this part,

[shawa]

I'm glad you liked it, GnrXr. The President's speech along with this
article are truly to be treasured.
Dr. Bottum has a Ph.D. in Medieval Philosophy and a truly brilliant mind.
It seems to me that his title for this article is a direct reply to Peggy
Noonan's article yesterday, complaining "Too Much God".
She apparently doesn't understand or rejects the concept of Natural Law
Philosophy which conveys the transcending ideals of Bush's speech.
A speech reflecting the President's convictions.

"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.

[rparrott21]

World freedom, can't beat that...