I won’t dwell on last night’s speech, but A Reveille, Not a Record summed up its strengths pretty well:
As a president and orator, Bush has two great strengths: moral clarity and resolve. To the Iraqi people, he declared, “Your enemy is not surrounding your country; your enemy is ruling your country.” To anti-war relativists, he observed of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, “If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning.” To the country and the world, he vowed: “Free people will set the course of history. “The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others. We will prevail.” When Bush talks like that, he doesn’t just send chills down people’s spines. He puts steel in them.That’s the good news. The bad news is the way Bush ducked the bad news.