Bush Farewell Address

Last night President Bush, with one weekend left of his term as President of the United States, addressed the nation in a final speech.

It was, as you would expect, almost all about the war on terror. As the president said:

As the years passed [since 9/11], most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning, I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe.

We all tussle and argue about how to direct the firehose of government programs in our direction. But for the president, the reality of his job is omnipresent: to protect the nation from enemies, foreign and domestic.

And so the president laid down a marker, a marker that will be sitting on the desk of the new president.

There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions. But there can be little debate about the results. America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil.

Democrats were insistent that 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch and therefore Bush was to blame. Well, on January 20th, the watch changes, and the new officer of the watch knows that anything that happens after that date happened on his watch.

Conservatives can be glad that President Bush also laid down the gauntlet on good and evil.

America must maintain our moral clarity. I’ve often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.

Some things are wrong, like “murdering the innocent.” Some things are right, like “freeing people from oppression and despair.” It is intriguing that the president uses left-of-center language to speak to his critics on the left.

President Bush, the fair-minded can agree, came to the presidency at a tough time. He served at the end of a time of conservative resurgence, and inherited a bunch of foolishness, from the “wall of separation” between foreign and domestic intelligence that the Clinton adminstration erected in the interests of civil liberties to the follies of Fannie and Freddie that Congress refused to see until the mortgage giants collapsed into a smoking ruin.

President Bush lacked the ability and the desire to dominate the national conversation from the president’s bully pulpit. Some have complained of this almost as a betrayal.

But the truth is that the national conversation is our job, the job of conservative thinkers and commenters. It is up to us to plant and water the seeds that someday a conservative president will display as dazzling blooms in the White House. President Bush served in a time when the old Reagan blooms were fading, with no new ones ready for display.

But we must not despair. We can see, even as we celebrate and honor the historic accession of President-elect Obama, that our Democratic friends have nothing to offer the American people except same-old-same-old.

Our Democratic friends will find out soon enough that the American people demand more than happy talk about Hope and Change. The American people know that something is wrong, and that reform is needed to sweep away the encrusted corruptions and decay of the past. It is a fact that most of those accretions are Democratic and liberal.

We conservatives know that the answer to the concerns of dispirited Americans does not lie in another expansion of government power but in a reduction in the power and the span of the political sector.

A great nation like the United States of America needs a careful balance between the three sectors of society. It needs a Greater Separation of Powers between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

Our liberal friends have built up, over the last century, a society in which everything issues out of the hegemony of the political sector, the sector of force and compulsion. They do not see, and cannot understand, that you cannot have a society of freedom, trust, care, and compassion if everything is decided in the cockpit of political power.

But we conservatives do understand this. It is our duty, and our destiny, as President Bush leaves office, to once more raise high the banner of freedom—political, economic, and moral/cultural—against the tired culture of compulsion that that our liberal friends continue to offer the American people.