The President is in no position to match Muslim offers to martyrs of an afterlife with 72 virgins, but he can assure American heroes of a more tranquil Heaven.
“I hope you find comfort,” Bush told families of the fallen at Arlington National Cemetery yesterday, “in knowing that your loved ones rest in a place even more peaceful than the fields that surround us here.”
He told them their sons, fathers and brother died defending “a country where citizens have the right to worship as they want, to march for what they believe, and to say what they think”—as long as they don’t mind being illegally wiretapped by his Attorney General and called traitors by his Vice President.
“Those who serve,” Bush assured their survivors, “are not fatalists or cynics. They know that one day this war will end--as all wars do...
“From their deaths must come a world where the cruel dreams of tyrants and terrorists are frustrated and foiled--where our nation is more secure from attack, and where the gift of liberty is secured for millions who have never known it.”
Presumably he was talking about Iraq, where it is getting harder every day to tell the tyrants and terrorists from the millions who don’t have security or liberty. But as long as they don’t succumb to becoming fatalists or cynics, it should all work out one day.
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2 comments:
I refused to even listen or watch anything yesterday that might show his mug or test my gag reflex at the sound of his voice. This former Marine reflected on his brothers and sisters in green. A couple of friends, a case of beer, and no George Bush.
Good take, Robert. Bush's (speechwriter's) statement:
"Now this hallowed ground receives a new generation of heroes — men and women who gave their lives in places such as Kabul and Kandahar, Baghdad and Ramadi. Like those who came before them, they did not want war — but they answered the call when it came..."
Is one of the ugliest unintentional self-damnations I've ever heard. Clueless doesn't begin to cut it. When I heard this sound bite on CNN early on Memorial Day (quickly expunged for the touchy feely lines), I couldn't believe he said it. And then, I couldn't believe that no one noticed it.
Paraphrasing: Now the soldiers I sent to their graves are in this cemetery, let me tell you how happy they must be to be dead ...
Hart Wms.
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