The Washington Times

It’s a little odd that the most vehement support for President Bush’s proposition that democracy is the best cure for terrorism came from the curling lips of Mr. Abu Musab Zarqawi.

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The Washington Times

Let’s see, how did that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross ditty go? Ah yes, “anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance.” This has resonance not merely in terms of coping with the prospect of dying, but also with regard to coping with George W. Bush. In what I suppose is progress, his critics seem to be making the passage from “anger” into “denial.” His second inaugural address last week was intellectually the richest such speech since Lincoln’s second, to which it bears comparison. Lincoln wrote his own, of course, and that will always be taken into consideration. On the other hand, it is the essence of Mr. Bush’s claim that the call of freedom is something everyone yearns for and can hear – and something more and more people recognize that everyone yearns for and can hear (the latter being the neglected critical point).

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The Washington Times

During the remarkable round of interviews he gave to major newspapers last week, President Bush spoke often of his commitment to the spread of democracy, sometimes in startling terms. As he told the Wall Street Journal in an aside after the end of the formal interview, “I understand there are many who say ‘Bush is wrong.’ I assume I’m right. It’s exciting to be part of stimulating a debate of such significance. It really is the philosophical argument of the age.” I don’t know which is the more remarkable: An American president who thinks in terms of “the philosophical argument of the age.” Or that, well, yes, Mr. Bush is right, the question of the spread of democracy really is the philosophical argument of the age.

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The Washington Times

Would-be tyrants and freedom fighters alike take note: The essence of democracy is not simply an election. It’s an election held in the expectation that there will be a subsequent election.

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The Washington Times

Have you noticed that the possibility of the reinstatement of the draft, so much a matter of worried if not fevered discussion and speculation a couple of months ago, seems to have disappeared? That’s about all the evidence anyone should need to see just how phony the issue was in the first place.

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