blake johnson

My friend Ben just made a really good comment to me over AIM:

well, Bush’s rhetoric is divorced from reality—both the reality of his policies and the reality on the ground. He is trying to be Reagan, but that is not what we need now. The Cold War was a rhetorical war, Reagan was a good president in that context. Now we have a lot of little messes and one big threat: Islamic Militant Fundamentalism. That threat and the little messes need to be dealt with with great care, diplomacy, and thought, which are not what Bush is good at. “Freedom” is not a message that works against an essentially national, post-colonial revolt in the Islamic world. they don’t hate our freedom, they don’t give a shit about our freedom, they just hate us because they feel we have been keeping them down for the last fifty years.