Via Power Line comes an essay in Esquire by someone who’s not exactly a fan of George W. Bush, but is compelled to examine the question of whether Bush might just be, well, right:
I thought that he was defining principles that desperately needed defining, with a clarity that those of my own political stripe demonstrate only when they’re decrying either his policies or his character. He was making a moral proposition upon which he was basing his entire presidency–or said he was basing his entire presidency–and I found myself in the strange position of buying into the proposition without buying into the presidency, of buying into the words while rejecting, utterly, the man who spoke them.
…
The United States, at this writing, has been in Iraq fifteen months. At the same point in the Civil War, Lincoln faced, well, a disaster unmitigated and unprecedented. He was losing . He didn’t lose, at least in part because he was able to both inspire and draw on the kind of moral absolutism necessary to win wars. Bush has been unable to do the same, at least in part because he is undercut by evidence of his own dishonesty*, but also because moral absolutism is nearly impossible to sustain in the glare of a twenty-four-hour news cycle. In a nation incapable of feeling any but the freshest wounds, Bush cannot seek to inspire moral absolutism without his moral absolutism becoming itself an issue–indeed, the issue. He cannot seek to engender certainty without being accused of sowing disarray. And he cannot speak the barest terms necessary for victory in any war–that we will stay the course, through good or through ill, because our cause is right and just, and God is on our side–without inspiring a goodly number of his constituents to aspire to the moral prestige of surrender.
* Of course the “dishonesty” of the President is a myth invented by his enemies. The story of his so-called “desertion” from the National Guard has turned out to be utterly false. The sixteen words — that Saddam tried to buy uranium from Niger — have just this last week been borne out. The fact that the not only the intelligence services of the U.S., Britain, Russia — and every other country in the world that mattered — but the leaders of the Democratic Party, thought that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.