At least some....

....get it. Duncan, at Powerline, publishes a comment from the effervescent Dafydd ab Hugh, who simply must get a blog of his own. Dafydd sees the same thing in Bush's inaugural address that I did and points out that some conservatives need to get out of the way.

Every conservative criticism of the speech I've read is a variant on the same theme: Bush couldn't possibly have meant what he said; therefore, he was either confused or lying. How dare he!

This only proves how necessary, even vital, was this address: even conservatives have lost the ideological core that was once America. We as the people no longer truly believe in liberty, not as Americans did for the first sesquicentennial. We have become cynical; we are little, green pieces of rock.

The new Bush call to liberty is not rash. It does not require we drop everything to march to the crusade, launching simultaneous attacks on Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Russia. Neither does it prohibit temporary alliances with tyrannies in order to defeat larger ones, as in World War II. But it does say that no longer will we acquiesce in another nation's tyranny simply for our own convenience. We will not overturn elections, overthrow democracies, or even, by our money and our silence, encourage autocracies to crack down on their own people's natural, godly desire for freedom. Appeasement is a tactic of weakness, and we are strong.

We have done these things before; we justified them in the name of a higher cause: trade, security, anticommunism. But Bush notes that, in the long run, we cannot rely on trade with dictatorships; and tyranny (not poverty) begets terrorism, which threatens America's security; and we cannot fight an ideology like Communism -- or militant Islamism -- without an equally robust ideology of our own... you can't defeat something with nothing. Our "something" is liberty; and without it, we are nothing more than the new Roman Empire, adrift in an ocean of relativism and cynical realism.

Indeed.

It still amazes me that people could be upset by the President setting the vision of advancing freedom throughout the world. Or being so puerile as to insist that we can't possibly accomplish such a lofty goal so why bother. Or worse yet, we've been hypocrites in the past, so why should anyone believe us!

It's like your father has appealed to your higher nature, forgiven you for your past poor behavior and encouraged you to stand on your principles from hence forward. You then, in a fit of pique, complain that you've never been scolded for your bad behavior before, you can't possibly begin to act on your principles now and you think it's unfair that he's asked you to do so.

And you still insist that he is wrong?