Posted 1/21/2005 05:31:00 PM by Douglas

More on Bush's second inaugural address. ][link may be hozed; try this one.] Holy crap! Who would have thought that Bush's speechwriters have read Dostoevsky? And why paraphrase him in an inaugural address?

In Dostoevsky's novel, that fire in the minds of men is not a yearning for liberty, but a nihilistic will to power that can only end in destruction. Put in George W. Bush's mouth, those words are not a paean to freedom, but a manifesto of pure destructionism. Like Governor Lembke, President Bush has no dearth of hardline advisers who counsel him in ways calculated to provoke a violent reaction: unlike Lembke, however, there is little chance George W. Bush will learn his lesson, even if it comes too late.

This is quite possibly the most worrisome and even frightening speech ever delivered by an American president. Its imagery of a fire burning up the world, coupled with the incendiary promise to aid "democratic reformers" against "outlaw regimes" worldwide, evokes the spirit of another murderous "idealism" – one that made the 20th century the age of mass murder. As he ranted on and on – "the expansion of freedom in all the world"; "Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation"; "When you stand for your liberty we will stand with you." – Bushed sounded more like Trotsky addressing the Red Army than an American president addressing his people. The militant, overtly ideological tone had about it a distinctly Bolshevik air:

This is quite disturbing, and yet eerily prophetic.

The Hitler analogy has become so overused that it lacks all meaning. Nazis in Germany in the 1930s were very efficient at a great number of things, and there are similarities between the way the Nazi propaganda machine was operated then and the fourth estate of today, but extrapolating that out to say Bush is anywhere close to Hitler is about as valid as saying the jet engine is evil because it was developed by the Nazi. And the haphazard comparisons of Bush (or anyone) to Hitler (or Stalin) not only makes people find crap like this amusing, it desensitizes us to the things we really should be concerned with. Has Bush taken steps to limit the civil liberties of all Americans? Yes. Is he rounding up and executing large numbers of minority citizens? No, but when you focus on the latter, it robs creditability from the former.

It's much more troubling, to me, anyway, that Bush has lent his ear to the millenarial dispensationalists intent of expediting the end of the world. Google "red heifer" +Bush for some interesting reading.