Interesting story here on NRO, in which President Bush sat down with writers and editors from the National Review for an interview. Putting aside the ridiculous loyalty to the idea of Harriet Myers as a Supreme Court Justice, the President said about what I'd hope he'd say, and I agree with him on the content.
I really liked his discussion of "connecting the dots". Lots of criticism came his ( and Bill Clinton's) way for "not connecting the dots" of AQ growth in the 90's and the activities leading up to 9-11. The country is viciously attacked--so he puts forward an apparatus that actually begins to give us the ability to connect dots...and he is attacked. His reminder to us of what it was like after 9-11 is important; I can't even imagine the pressure and importance of the decisions that were being made in the White House at that point.
I hope if our nation has learned anything from the last 8 years, it is that when our nation is at war, we have an obligation, a self-preservative one, to come together as a nation, even if there are aspects of policy with which we disagree. That doesn't mean we don't argue, even vehemently so, for what we believe. It also doesn't mean that we blindly accept transgressions of government any more than we would during peacetime. But I believe it does mean that we don't go overseas and apologize to those who disagree with our nation's course, that we don't hold up our leadership as despised and incompetent criminals and we look real GDed hard at what we are doing to help our fellow citizens who are doing the real work of keeping us safe from the enemy who seek to kill us and disrupt/destroy our way of life. That means we put aside our personal issues about having to drive around with a bumper sticker for a losing candidate because like-minded citizens couldn't figure out the simplicity of how to vote and it also means maybe we experience a little inconvenience incurred by reducing our gas consumption, Chinese products consumption, etc. Very few Americans are carrying the load for the rest of us right now while we consume, on credit, and denounce vicerally our national policies and our twice duly- elected leadership. It's like traffic...if everyone works together to keep traffic moving at a decent pace, everyone gets to his destination much sooner than when a bunch of us try to rush through it. Anyway, having witnessed it from the receiving side for 8 years, I hope we who this time have the losing bumper stickers can set an example of citizenry that has frankly been missing of late. And by the way, some of us weren't all that impressive as citizens during the Clinton administration. But we weren't so clearly at war then either (even though we probably ought to have been).
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