GWB as JFK's Heir

By JAMES TARANTO
The Wall Street Journal Online
April 14, 2004

President Bush was at his best last night, in an hour-long televised speech and news conference on the war on terror. Some of the highlights:

"The violence we are seeing in Iraq is familiar. The terrorist who takes hostages, or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid, and murders children on buses in Jerusalem, and blows up a nightclub in Bali, and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew."


"Over the last several decades, we've seen that any concession or retreat on our part will only embolden this enemy and invite more bloodshed. And the enemy has seen, over the last 31 months, that we will no longer live in denial or seek to appease them. For the first time, the civilized world has provided a concerted response to the ideology of terror--a series of powerful, effective blows."

On the comparison of Iraq to Vietnam: " I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy. Look, this is hard work. It's hard to advance freedom in a country that has been strangled by tyranny. And, yet, we must stay the course, because the end result is in our nation's interest."

It's hard to believe, but Democrats used to talk like this, back when it was the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, rather than of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis and JFK's dissolute youngest brother. In his Inaugural Address, for example, JFK famously said:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

And as Thomas Sowell notes, the 35th president also said of America's enemies: "We dare not tempt them with weakness"--an almost identical sentiment to the one Bush expresses in the second quote above.

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To show how decadent the Democratic Party has become since President Kennedy's day, we turn to blogger Josh Marshall, whom this column regards as the authoritative voice of partisan Democrats. Not surprisingly, he gives President Bush an unfavorable review:

What I saw was a man with a quiver of cliches and a few simple stock arguments. . . . It's become a bit impolitic in Washington to question whether the president really knows what he's doing or whether he has any sort of a detailed handle on what's going on on his watch. But I didn't see much sign of either. I just saw a lot of push harder, freedom, we're changing the world, ditching my policies means the terrorists win, etc.

So freedom is just a cliché? Such sneering cynicism is certainly a far cry from "pay any price, bear any burden." If this is really what the 21st-century Democratic Party thinks of freedom, maybe John Kerry should make Bobby McGee his running mate.

It amazes me the lengths to which republicans will go in order to attempt rationalizing
the actions of GWB. Making comparisons between Bush and John F. Kennedy is an indication
of their desperation, as most folks who have a brain fragment lodged in their skulls
realize that Bush is half the man JFK was.

Heir as in inheriting the same type of thinking that involved us in the Viet Nam Quagmire? Heir as in inheriting the same sort of strategic bumbling and micro-management that kept the SE Asian conflict going far too long? Heir as in inheriting the same sort of fraud as the Tonkin Resolution when applied to WMD? Heir to the same sort of hubris that declared that we were "liberating" the people of Viet Nam from tyranny as we now declare ourselves to be "liberating" the Iraqi people?

Okay. Yeah.

I knew this would get your goat! ;-)

It seems that the primary arguments against the analogy in this article take two forms: One implies that Bush is nothing like JFK; the other implies that JFK is a bad thing to emulate. The problem, as I see it, is that these arguments work against each other. They seem to be contradictory to the point you want to make.

Perhaps a better question would be: Do you agree with that portion of JFK's speech that declares: "We shall pay any price , bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty" ?