What Americans need to hear
Rod Dreher has an excellent article in Thurday's Dallas Morning News that captures well what Americans and the world most needs to hear this election season that has been so desperately missing in our national and international democratic conversation.
The speech John McCain should give
From that speech:
"My friends, I am neither young nor eloquent, handsome nor smooth. But I have lived a long life, much of it in service to America in war and in peace. And I have always stood for straight talk. There has been no time in our nation’s recent history when the American people more needed to hear the plain truth from their leaders. A fundamental reason our country faces economic catastrophe is that we have built our lives around running from truths about the American way of life.
Washington has run from the truth. Wall Street has run from the truth. And if we’re honest with ourselves, all of us have, in one way or another, run from the truth.
We have accepted the lie that we can live exactly as we want to live, with no concern for the consequences. We have taken the blessings of liberty and prosperity and turned them into a curse of debt slavery - bondage that will be visited on our children, and our children’s children, if we don’t change.
Everybody has a theory about how we got into this mess, and it’s usually one that absolves them and their party from blame. My friends, I’m here to tell you that this crisis is the Republicans’ fault. It’s the Democrats’ fault. It’s the fault of every one of us who believed in the fairy tale of a free lunch.
It’s time for all Americans to take responsibility for what we’ve done. It’s time for all Americans to pull together to help our families, our neighbors and our country through hard times.
I will not lie to you and tell you that the road ahead will be easy. I will not insult you by giving you simple villains, simple heroes or simplistic solutions. As the song says, everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die. My fellow Americans, all of us must sacrifice to endure the trials that history sends our way and to rebuild our nation on a solid foundation of honor, truth and plainspoken virtue.
I know something about sacrifice. And I know something about the way life can break your pride. I was a cocky Navy aviator who thought he was invulnerable. Then I was shot out of the sky and spent five years in prison. That experience did not kill me. It made me stronger. It taught me how much I loved my God, my family and my country - and what trials I could endure for the sake of that love.
I am a patriot. I believe we are a nation of patriots, of men and women who are ready and willing to put country first. But over the years, our leaders, Republican and Democratic, have asked us to do little more than to go shopping, to vote for them and to blame other people for what’s wrong with America. Anything to keep us from facing the truth and changing our ways.
As your president, I will ask you to do hard things. I, too, will do hard things for the good of this great nation. Serious times call for serious leadership. In his first speech as prime minister, with his free nation facing the might of Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill refused to mislead the British people about the gravity of their situation. We remember today his words to them: 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.'
Churchill did not give cheap optimism. He, too, had fought and suffered for his nation, both on the battlefield and in Parliament. He had known the joy of victory and the humiliation of defeat. What Churchill, from his incomparable experience, could offer his people was the gold standard of hope. Hope is the conviction that whatever suffering we must go through, goodness and right shall prevail.
Today, when I survey the gathering storm, I am certain that if we, the people, stand together without fear or favor, victory will be ours. I ask you to give me the privilege of leading this great nation in a time when heroes will be made, and all good men and women must come to the aid of their country.
Thank you, and God bless America."
4 comments:
Fine speech. He could give it, but no one could believe it because a healthy percentage of it is in direct contrast with who he really is.
I guess this is what I'm saying. It's a fine speech and it would be a good thing for a candidate to say--but only to the extent that it was honest. It wouldn't be honest coming from McCain. It would just be a good speech. It's wrongly premised on the assumption that it somehow represents John McCain's beliefs...
Look, you know that I'm not a crazy lunatic lefty. Hell, I was prepared to vote for McCain if he ended up running against Hillary. I even entertained the notion as it became clear that Obama was going to get the nomination.
What I have seen and heard from John McCain in the last month or so has been gut-wrenching. I weep for my country and I weep for what's left of a seemingly decent guy who used to go by John McCain.
Obama is an imperfect candidate in about 8,123 ways. There's no doubt about that. I happen to think that his tax plan is a fucking poli-joke that's about as deceptive as Doug Henning on a good day. I have real reservations about his health care approach. He's not 100% honest and he's certainly not above playing a very traditional bullshit game when it suits him. He's not always on the high road and he's (unfortunately) mastered a weird form of passive aggressive campaigning that irks me quite a bit.
Nonetheless, he's about half as repugnant as John McCain currently is. Maybe only a third.
I am currently sickened by McCain for the same reasons that I deemed Hillary Clinton a fucking monster. He's a twisted fuck who, in the face of potential defeat, has sold out anything approaching decency or cogency in favor of spraying diarrhea against the wall.
You write wisely about power, Ben. I have personally never witnessed a more grotesque power grab effort than what I've seen recently. Who knows, maybe Nixon was as bad but I was a wee one and didn't get to pay close attention. Aside from that possibility, though, few have been as obviously weird in their power clutch has been The Maverick.
There are things about Obama that I can't justify. There are weaknesses and errors and flash over substance and a host of other leadership sins.
None of them measure up to McCain in my estimation, though. There is a difference between imperfection and perversion. All tumors are bad, but the malignant ones are worse than the benign.
Neither of these guys are perfectly suited for the Presidency. None are willing to be the most honest where it counts the most.
But one is brighter than the other. One is at least nominally less toxic in approach than the other.
And while one makes me cry over the devolution of a potentially great thing, the other at least occasionally reminds us of our better natures and possibilities.
You know what... I'm getting the "I might just vote for McCain" vibe off of you. If that's the case, the two of us should have a big ol' online debate... A little back and forth.
I love you, Ben, but if you're voting for McCain I think you are making an egregious error. I really do. Maybe we should duke it out and find out if I'm right or not. If we don't do it online, we should do it at an entertaining establishment of some sort--the kind of place the Founding Fathers would really dig.
In any case, that speech from the DMN would be as believable coming from McCain as it would be from Obama or HRC or Rudy911 or Edwards or Freddy Thompson.
Unfortunately, none of them believe what the author is writing. It's a groovy fantasy to think that someone might take that high of a road, but right now it's fantasy.
Later
No, I think I may have given you the wrong impression from that post, Carson.
I'm marginally favoring Obama, even with my very grave concerns about his economic policies and the romance the left has with regulation, right now. Every time I hear E.J. Dionne open his big fat mouth, I think to myself, "John McCain doesn't sound so bad." If E.J. wants Barack Obama to be elected, the best he could do for him would be to shut his big fuckin' mouth until he has more than his one repeated assertion of regulation of the economy solves all economic ills by fiat bullshit to contribute to the conversation. It gets annoying to listen to that bullshit over and over again with nothing more than repetition of the same assertion like I'm supposed to take it more seriously than I think it deserves.
Having said all of that, McCain is not only stinking up the joint, more importantly to me, his foreign policy positions are just kind of scary to me and very likely to reinforce most of our more serious problems, right now, I think. Threatening and engaging in warfare to promote freedom and democracy is a really fuckin' stupid idea. And the evidence does not weigh heavily in its favor, except under circumstances that need some very serious debate and discussion about ways of engaging military interventions in very specific situations where we might engage and in ways likely to account for democratic concerns mroe genuinely.
So I'm voting for Obama, at this point. Because conservatives are too big of dipshits to learn any of the easy lessons from this fuckin' war and 5 years of failure curbing Iranian nuke proliferation.
But I do it with serious reservations about The One and what I regard as far too much confidence in his own outlook on the world. I'll spend 4 years critiquing him and hoping for a better alternative from the Republican side in the next election. And I'm definitely voting for split government. There is no way that I want Democratic dominance of government any more than I have been thrilled with Republican dominance of government in the last 8 years. I am definitely a serious admirer of Baron de Montesquieu and separation of powers, these days. And the last 8 years have reinforced my admiration for the principle. And I'll be looking to give it support in this next election (I think I'm voting Roberts over Slattery, and I definitely want Democrats to lose Congress if they win the Presidency; God knows they deserve to lose Congress, I think). A split between Congress, an Obama Presidency, and a marginally right-of-center Supreme Court would not be a terrible outcome from this election. God knows I don't need anymore single-party rule for another 4-8 years. I'm beyond tired of that bullshit.
We should debate, regardeless, Carson, just because I want to hear your arguments, generally, around the places we have had disagreement and to hear someone make them intelligently, in contrast to the bullshit I've had to listen to passively on NPR every morning. And just because I want to hear what you're up to, dude. I'll have to share with you my story of the really intellectual juvenile delinquent we had this year and who just got removed from his home. You'll really appreciate this kid's perspectives, I think, Carson. He's a big Hunter S. Thompson fan, if that gives you any idea.
Are you busy next weekend, dude? We should find some time for dinner and beers. Maybe hang out with Sherry, if she's available. Or whatever you want to do, dude.
I'll try to give you a call as soon as I have a chance, dude.
Talk soon.
Ben
All sounds good. In the interest of fairness, I should mention something about Johnny Mac.
About five minutes after my comment, I learned that he did something surprisingly decent and honorable. Once upon a time, that wouldn't have been as shocking as it is now, but nonetheless he deserves kudos.
He tried to settle down one of his nutty rally crowds by telling them that they don't need to be afraid of Obama and that he just thinks he'd be a better President.
That was a tough thing for him to do right now, with the apparent strategy of the week being to go after Scary Obama. It can't be easy to tell your boiling base to settle down.
One might argue that his decision was motivated by internals showing that the Scary Obama Strategy wasn't working, but I'd like to believe that it came from his heart. I really want to believe that McCain was seeing what I've been seeing in that strategy and that he realized it was the wrong way.
In either case, he took the high road today and that was a good thing.
Now, with respect to your post... I'm glad to hear that you aren't casting your lot with JM and that you're leaning toward BO. Maybe we can find a way to duke it out on some of these things. Who knows, I might convince you to cut a campaign donation check for Barry before it's all over. Not that I've done that personally, though.
I am ready, willing and able to come up with something next weekend. This weekend is jam-packed, but there's no reason that I can't escape the velvet trap of domesticity for one night.
Later!
I will say, Carson, that your candidate (and his minions) would need to behave far better before he would ever in his wildest dreams see a single dime from he.
Barack Obama is getting pity vote from me, right now, because his foreign policy commitments are slightly stronger than his opponents, despite the fact that he has shown not nearly enough leadership this election, and neither has his opponent, in focussing the American and international public on an honest and substative debate and discussion of policy. Barack Obama's economic policies are poorly conceived, and we will be dealing with the consequences of that, I'm sure, and I'm also quite sure that I will never, ever hear him acknowledge such any better than his predecessor acknowledged any of his own policy failings. It is the nature of a self-righteous and foolish politics that its participants are too big of cowards to ever acknowledge that they are wrong. And that is what people like me and the rest of the scholarly community and the marketplace of ideas are meant for, in addition to our primary job of providing more honest and substantial understanding of the world: to correct for the cowardice of people who hold the offices to acknowledge their own failings.
Barack Obama could lose my vote if John McCain becomes a substantially better option in the next month or so. And he will not get another vote from me if he continues to conduct himself this way and there is an alternative that more clearly highlights the bankrputcy of this kind of politics.
The netroots and the liberal and conservative base are going to get a rude fucking awakening, as far as I am concerned, about how politics really operates and will operate, better, in future elections, no matter how much they bullshit and lie and play ugly and self-serving games with democratic elections.
This bullshit is going to end. And I will be playing as much of a role in ending it as my life can offer.
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