Special guest poster Ranger Rick is now with us. Here's her first post:
I have to go downstairs to watch the snow piling up in front of the midtown Manhattan office building where I work; since I sit at a cubicle and all the offices with windows have their doors shut and locked tight, the blizzard outside is largely a thing of my imagination. And since, in my imagination, the chance exists that I will be sleeping here tonight, curled up in a tiny ball beneath my desk amidst the crumbs from my morning muffins, I thought I'd take this opportunity to go rogue and post my first blah blahs here, because Josh said I could, although I'm still not sure why.
I read this editorial from young David Brooks in the NY Times today, and must confess to being a little confused about what he's saying. We've all acknowledged now that the "Freedom Speech" Bush delivered on Thursday, "Freedom" having defeated "Liberty" by the score of 27 to 15 (see below), was largely just a weird little piece of political posturing (unless we are William Safire, and then we compare it to Lincoln), but in this essay, Brooks is either saying that 1. it will, by the very nature of having escaped from Dubya's pursed little lips, change the nature of American foreign policy for years to come, or 2. because of the nature of American foreign policy, it will forever be remembered as the biggest load of horseshit in history. I can't tell, though, because sarcasm is so very hard to judge when being delivered by pasty white men in the pages of the NY Times, which side Brooks is on. I sort of want to take it as a slap in the face to the current administration (though, to be fair, that's how I want to take everything), but in some ways it could be construed as a very optimistic look at putting deeds with our words-- "walking the walk," as the Christians would say-- and how this administration and those that follow now have a unique opportunity to change the world.
Towards the end, Brooks says,
The speech does not mean that Bush will always live up to his standard. But the bias in American foreign policy will shift away from stability and toward reform. It will be harder to cozy up to Arab dictators because they can supposedly help us in the war on terror. It will be clearer that those dictators are not the antidotes to terror; they're the disease.
But honestly, can you really imagine Bush and etc. discussing how to respond to some sort of aggressive Syrian whatever, and being all like, "Dude, maybe we should get Saudi Arabia to lean on them or something before we invade!" and an undersecretary of defense slowly raising his hand and saying, "But sir! The inagural speech!" and Bush hanging his head, shaking it quickly back and forth to clear the now-verboten suggestion from the air and laughing, "Oh god. You're right. I'm such an idiot, I'm sorry"?
Yeah. Me neither. And I don't even really understand how this stuff works all that much.