"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
"We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom.
"Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner “Freedom Now” — they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.
"When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, “It rang as if it meant something.” In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof."
President Bush's eloquent Inaugural Address committing America to the advance of freedom around the world had definite Kennedy-esque overtones. Deacon at Power Line agrees:
The MSM, I expect, will rip this uncompromising and single-minded assertion of our values and ideals. But that's because it won't acknowledge that we're at war. Those who know that we are will welcome the echoes of Churchill and Kennedy as just the kind of rhetoric demanded by the times.
[T]he president has formally declared that we at least will be on the right side of history and thus we have to let his critics sort...their own moral calculus.
A just-married colleague and I stopped at a smoke shop over lunch for celebratory cigars. Inspired by the morning's oratory, we bought Churchills.
The Reuters photo above taken this morning recalls a Lifecover photo from 40 years ago (only jollier), saying something of the grandeur as well as the orderliness of American democracy.
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The Washington Post takes a look at the best and worst of presidential inauguration speeches. (Via Fr Tucker)
Warren G. Harding's is counted among the Worst. Here's an excerpt:
We would not have an America living within and for herself alone, but we would have her self-reliant, independent, and ever nobler, stronger, and richer. Believing in our higher standards, reared through constitutional liberty and maintained opportunity, we invite the world to the same heights. But pride in things wrought is no reflex of a completed task. Common welfare is the goal of our national endeavor. … We want the cradle of American childhood rocked under conditions so wholesome and so hopeful that no blight may touch it in its development …
He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle.
For his 1905 swearing-in, President Theodore Roosevelt wore a ring containing a lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair. More than 35,000 celebrants marched in the ensuing parade, from coal miners, cowboys, Native Americans, and African-American cavalry troops, to Roosevelt’s old Spanish-American War regiment, the Rough Riders.
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