now, obviously, i don't like the guy. that's been made perfectly clear by this site. but i did try to be fair. inaugural addresses are not really for detailed proposals, but rather to set a tone for the upcoming administration.
but as i read the speech all i could think of is how it sounded like a C+ "what america means to me" paper written by a 14 year old. the images were so sweeping and repetitive they crossed the line from inspiring to vapid. not only was repetitive, it featured rhetorical straw men like "Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty though this time in history..." who exactly questioned that? the words "freedom" and "liberty" were repeated so many times, they quickly lost any sense of gravity or meaning.
in short, i was unimpressed. so then, after working my way further into the paper, i came across william safire's column in which he characterized bush's speech as "among the top 5 of the 20 second-inaugurals in our history." is the bar for second inaugural speeches really that low? safire, however, actually seemed to like the speech, partly for the very reason i found it to be so insipid:
Not only did the words "freedom, free, liberty" appear 49 times, but the president used the world-watched occasion to expound his basic reason for the war and his vision of America's mission in the world.using the same words 49 times in a twenty-minute speech is a good thing? it's more reminiscent of brainwashing techniques than eloquence. and i didn't see any "basic reasons for the war" anywhere in the speech (the words "iraq" and "afghanistan" don't appear at all). unless that "basic reason" is "freedom. which is funny, because that wasn't the "basic reason" back in early 2003. colin powell never mentioned this basic reason in his presentation to the UN security council when he tried to sell the iraqi war to the rest of the world.
i dunno. maybe i'm just not good at evaluating these things. unlike safire, i am not a former speechwriter for a president who resigned in disgrace, so what do i know?
safire recounts that during cabinet meeting last november bush told his speechwriter "I want this [inaugural address] to be the freedom speech." i don't know why safire finds inspiration in that anecdote. maybe at this coming cabinet meeting bush will tell his speechwriter that he wants his state of the union address to be "the belgian waffle speech." the idea that bush has to pull ideas like that out of the hat and then drum it into our heads with mindless repetition does not suggest that anything the president says relates in any way to anything that he does. he's just a salesman looking for after-the-fact justifications.
