One Day, One and a Half Remarkable Speeches

Amid all the clatter of this messy and sometimes ugly time in America, two lights shone today, when two good men chose to speak. In the first, President George W. Bush delivered a ringing defense of freedom, and American engagement in and leadership of the free world. Here is the text of his remarks, and the video is below.



Bush calls out Russia and China, and democracies who seem to be retrenching from the global order--including our own. He points out that our "...discourse has been degraded by casual cruelty." Spot on. Liberals--who for eight years excoriated this man--have taken to their favored social media platforms today to point out how wonderful he is. Most of us already knew that.

The second speaker was the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, John Kelly. In a remarkable presentation, Kelly--a retired Marine four-star and father of a Marine killed in Afghanistan--walked the White House press-room through a number of subjects that most of them probably hadn't thought about much before, or at least before the other day. He described the process of alerting next of kin when someone dies in combat. He laid out what have been the processes/procedures followed by recent Presidents, specifically whether phone calls were made or not. He described his conversations with the President about what to say in such a call--which must surely be a terribly difficult call to make. You can watch it below:




Kelly speaks here with the authority of a combat marine who has ordered men to their deaths, and he speaks here with the experience of a grieving father. It is a riveting speech--and Kelly had me in the palm of his hand for much of it--until this:

"It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation. Absolutely stuns me. And I thought at least that was sacred. You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That's obviously not the case anymore as we see from recent cases. Life -- the dignity of life -- is sacred. That's gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well. Gold Star families, I think that left in the convention over the summer. But I just thought -- the selfless devotion that brings a man or woman to die on the battlefield, I just thought that that might be sacred."

Hold on, General, back that truck up. What the member of Congress did by listening in and then blabbing to the press was indeed reprehensible, and you are to be commended for calling her out. But the rest of it? Your views on what was once "sacred"? Women? Religion? Gold Star  families?  Do you remember who it is you are Chief of Staff to? Wasn't this the man who took great pride in committing sexual assault against women?   Wasn't this the man who claimed that an entire religion "hates" the U.S.?  Wasn't this the man who said that John McCain--who endured unspeakable torture for six and a half years--when he could have accepted an earlier release--was not a hero?

I was with you General Kelly. You were telling it straight, and you did a good job of humanizing the very difficult job the President would have had in making  those calls. But the minute you began to wax poetic about the loss of the sacred in America--when you work in the next office over from the most sacrilegious man to ever hold the office, who daily cheapens our national discourse and has put the "bully" in the bully pulpit--you lost me.