WHICH FITS YOU? Are you viewed as being "resolute" or merely "stubborn"?
If you have been listening with close attention this past week to the speeches being made by our President George W. Bush the past week or so, you may have wondered if he has suddenly shifted to a whole new new crew of presidential speech writers.
It is a refreshing and most encouraging thing to see and hear a President of the United States telling other nations what they must or must not do. We have, for much too long, witnessed our leaders moving among the nations cajoling, suggesting, wishing and even begging or buying cooperation in areas of mutual need. We now have a president who seems ready to set forth his views in more deliberate terms. He has been telling our sometimes weak and vacillating allies not what he wishes they would do - but, rather, what they "must" do. He has rather skillfully cajoled his way past the critical, areas of stuffy state protocol, routine and habit and telling them not what he "hopes" they might, in time, decide to do, but what he expects them to get done - and right away, too. There has been an unusual amount of individual, personal and sincere praise and sincere appreciation for their limited support in the past, too. Bush has, wisely, not held back on that important ingredient.
One gets the feeling, too, that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in her initial get-acquainted visits to leading capitals, might well have set the stage for such a shift to more positive position assertions to follow with the presidential appearances.
Reaction to such rather stern instructions as those President Bush has been issuing to Germany and to Putin in Russia has been keyed to alert some disbelief overseas. Here at home our media ind-moulders have not yet seen the picture or even heard - much less credited - the more aggressive tone of what is being said. The George Bush we are seeing in action in the middle of the month of February 2005 is somewhat different from the way many of them have pictured him to be. The George W. Bush we are now seeing and hearing is more aggressive in tone, text and intent. He can be what he is becoming for several reasons: one - with the presidential election over much of the petty political quibbling has ceased and he fact that he now leads in a "lame duck" situation is something which encrouages him to take chances, to "let fly" and suggest ideas which have a better chance of success in an atmosphere of unity. He can now tell nations what their place might be in building a better future for the peaceful democratic nation of Iraq - put some teeth in their talk about their willingness to combat poverty, disease, ignorance, and other such seeds of terrorism. Bush can now speak to the United Nations as a kindly old Grandma character telling them to get their nasty, little, stained hands out of the "Oil For Food" Cookie Jar - or else. He might even get tell to them to clean up their Living Room a bit ...now... right away! By 3 A.M. next Tuesday morning, at at the latest.
Go Bush! Go. Be resolute. Be stubborn. Good work.
A.L.M. February 22, 2005 [c559wds]
