President Bush will be spending his birthday in Scotland next week:

But when asked if he would be tempted to try haggis, he was blunt. “Yes, haggis, I was briefed on haggis . . . No.

“Generally, on your birthday, my mother used to say, ‘What do you want to eat?’ and I don’t ever remember saying, ‘Haggis, Mum’.”

He laid it out so plain even a liberal should be able to understand:

The war reached our shores on September 11, 2001. The terrorists who attacked us and the terrorists we face murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance and despises all dissent. Their aim is to remake the Middle East in their own grim image of tyranny and oppression by toppling governments, driving us out of the region and by exporting terror.

To achieve these aims, they have continued to kill in Madrid, Istanbul, Jakarta, Casablanca, Riyadh, Bali and elsewhere. The terrorists believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and decadent, and with a few hard blows they can force us to retreat. They are mistaken. After September 11, I made a commitment to the American people: This nation will not wait to be attacked again. We will defend our freedom. We will take the fight to the enemy.

• Daimnation says His best speech ever

• Citizen Smash liveblogged the speech and ends his post with HOO-RAH!
• The Moderate Voice says it was a solid speech but won’t convince the waverers, much less the critics.
• PoliPundit says it was “extremely good”, but public perception will depend on the media spin.
• INDC Journal says, “The speech was Bush’s most cogent articulation of the strategy, difficulties and stakes in Iraq to date …”
• What Can Brown Do For You? says Bush must continue to take his message directly to the people.
• Bill Hobbs says that Bush effectively dismantled the arguments for a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq, and also posts a pre-speech statement from my congressman, Marsha Blackburn.
• Donald Sensing was underwhelmed.
• Outside the Beltway has a pretty good blogosphere reaction roundup.
• JustOneMinute blogs Pelosi’s reaction, as well as the reaction of the children (ages 8-11) who watched.
• For those of you missed it, the Political Teen has the video.

Here’s a surprising stat:

According to figures compiled by Congressional Quarterly and cited by Mr. Thurber, Mr. Bush in his first term had the best record of getting his initiatives through Congress of any president since Johnson.

(Thurber is the director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington.)

Tom Velk is both Canadian and an academician. Yet surprisingly, he gets it:

Can the West ask for a better world leader than Mr. Bush? I don’t think so. At a time when Martin sends his lieutenants into provincial capitals to buy votes with road construction, health “services” and tuition money, and Conservative leader Stephen Harper is being asked to match the bribes, dollar for dollar, Bush is reminding the world that the end of the Second World War marked the beginning of 50 years of oppression by the Soviets in Eastern Europe.

My town’s newspaper, the Montreal Gazette, headlined: “Bush spars with Putin.” Of course, he did no such limited thing. His attack was intended for a more general class of malefactors. Bush apologized for Yalta, the last of the many insults FDR imposed upon the generations who succeeded him, and the first of the many victories the international left enjoyed in the confused aftermath of that terrible war. The apology was offered to all the civilized world for having allowed the crazed ideology of communism free reign; and the slap was given to the several generations of western apologists for the crimes against humanity that resulted. If only our upcoming election could be fought on such high ground.

Read it all.

I have been preaching that the Democrats are the party of extremes for quite some time, having as its base both the very poor and the very rich as well as the illiterates and intellectuals. It is the rich that keep the party going through huge donations.

Journalist Byron York pursues this (and other) topics in his new book Not vast enough, reviewed in the Washington Examiner:

York’s chapter on the ACT [America Coming Together 529] is the best part of the book. It thoughtfully examines the rewritten ground rules of politics and also begins to dismantle the myth that the GOP is the rich party. Characters like Soros and other filthy-rich leftists pervade the book, but York doesn’t aim to leave the perception that they are exceptions to the rule.

“People who contributed less than $200 to politicians and parties gave 64 percent of their money to Republicans,” writes York, based on 2002 campaign-finance data. “People who gave $1 million or more to politicians or parties gave 92 percent to Democrats.“

From Christopher Hitchens:

The Bush administration retains its capacity to startle, mainly because it has redefined the lazy term ‘conservative’ to mean someone who is impatient with the status quo.

One problem I had with the early Bush administration was that they refused to investigate any of the plethora of improprieties crimes from the former administration, e.g., Reno and the Ellian Gonzales fiasco, Reno and the attack on citizens in Waco, Reno and the political vendetta against Joseph Gersten, Reno and . . . well, you get the idea.

The latest is bout of protectionism is downright offensive.

The Judicial Watch (of which I was once a member back when I had disposable income) won a court battle to gain access to documents dealing with the infamous night-of-140-Clinton-pardons. The wording of the ruling was pretty clear:

In May of 2004 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled the Bush Administration’s claim of presidential communications privileges regarding the Justice Department documents “. . .would be both contrary to executive privilege precedent and considerably undermine the purposes of FOIA to foster openness and accountability in government.” Furthermore the Court added that such an extension “. . . would have far-reaching implications for the entire executive branch that would seriously impede the operation and scope of FOIA.”

The Justice Department complied by providing 915 pages of blackened pages containing no useful information:

The Bush administration blacked out almost all the information in hundreds of documents before releasing them to a conservative organization looking into President Clinton’s controversial pardons four years ago on his last day in office.

The only items not deleted from the material are the names of the person who wrote the document and the person it was sent to.

The documents provided by Justice can be accessed here. But really, don’t bother. It takes a long time to download pages colored black and there are an awful lot of them.

I never thought I would read something even vaguely pro-Bush in NewSpeak Newsweek, but today there is an article that gives some grudging approval:

The other noted political scientist who has been vindicated in recent weeks is George W. Bush. Across New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—and probably Europe and Asia as well—people are nervously asking themselves a question: “Could he possibly have been right?” The short answer is yes. Whether or not Bush deserves credit for everything that is happening in the Middle East, he has been fundamentally right about some big things.

Amazing. Short-lived, no doubt. But still amazing.

The German rag Spiegel is, as can easily be seen at David Medienkritik’s, a mouthpiece for the German left (which is, by American standards, very left indeed). So when it asks the question, “Could George W. Bush Be Right?“, one should certainly take notice:

Germany loves to criticize US President George W. Bush’s Middle East policies — just like Germany loved to criticize former President Ronald Reagan. But Reagan, when he demanded that Gorbachev remove the Berlin Wall, turned out to be right. Could history repeat itself?…

But history has shown that it wasn’t Reagan who was the dreamer as he voiced his demand. Rather, it was German politicians who were lacking in imagination — a group who in 1987 couldn’t imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany. Those who spoke of reunification were labelled as nationalists and the entire German left was completely uninterested in a unified Germany. …

Even German conservatives find the idea that Arabic countries could transform themselves into enlightened democracies somewhat absurd.

This, in fact, is likely the largest point of disagreement between Europe and the United States — and one that a President John Kerry likely would not have made smaller: Europeans today — just like the Europeans of 1987 — cannot imagine that the world might change. Maybe we don’t want the world to change, because change can, of course, be dangerous. But in a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. In Mainz today, the stagnant Europeans came face to face with the dynamic Americans. We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow. …

It was difficult not to cringe during Reagan’s speech in 1987. He didn’t leave a single Berlin cliché out of his script. At the end of it, most experts agreed that his demand for the removal of the Wall was inopportune, utopian and crazy.

Yet three years later, East Germany had disappeared from the map. …

When the voter turnout in Iraq recently exceeded that of many Western nations, the chorus of critique from Iraq alarmists was, at least for a couple of days, quieted. Just as quiet as the chorus of Germany experts on the night of Nov. 9, 1989 when the Wall fell.

Just a thought for Old Europe to chew on: Bush might be right, just like Reagan was then.

Astounding, but I think it is a momentary abberation. No doubt the editors, realizing that something is wrong with the world, will lie down for a bit and then rise up and recommit themselves to being the smug and pretentious illuminati that we have all come to know and pity.

Nice article on the GOP and Bush at the ACUF:

The most successful presidents, however, are never satisfied just dealing with the problems of the moment. They want to do more, and it is in this that the son differs from his father and so many of their predecessors.

Anyone who has listened to President George W. Bush since he was reelected has to know that he will not be content simply serving for the next four years with an eye to his popularity. The agenda upon which he hoped to build during his first term may have been delayed by the Islamic terrorists who have occupied so much of his time, but it has not been abandoned.

That the centerpiece of that agenda is Social Security reform says a lot about Bush and his willingness to both think big thoughts and take enormous risks. The presidents we remember are those who have been willing to do both and had the backbone to choose battles that they could have avoided or delayed because they have believed they must be fought.

The Social Security “crisis” of which Bush talks is real, but he could take the advice of politicians who, like Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.), wonder why we should deal with it today since the system won’t actually crash while most present politicians aren’t in office. The answer is, of course, that responsible leaders don’t lay real problems off on others or on their children and grandchildren; real leaders either lead or lose.

Exactly.