The American Spectator

TAS Live

(Page 5 of 9)

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Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty - though… Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals. Eventually the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul…. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.

br> Above even Reagan, however, it is Abraham Lincoln -- the greatest Republican of them all, and the greatest of all American Presidents -- whose spirit hovers most brightly over the face of Bush's Second Inaugural. Lincoln, indeed, is the only one he quotes directly and by name: br>

The rulers of outlaw regimes know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it."

br> But there are also many unattributed echoes of Lincoln throughout this speech. For example, on Lincoln's "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy," Bush composes this variation: br>

Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.

br> Another example is the creative adaptation by Bush of Lincoln's summation of the "real issue" of his debates with Stephen Douglas. Lincoln: br>

It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle…. No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

br> Now Bush: br>

We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.

p>YET TO DEMOSTRATE even more definitively that his own Doctrine is rooted deep in American soil, Bush reaches not only beyond his 20th-century predecessors of both parties and back to Lincoln; he even goes beyond Lincoln and all the way back to the Declaration of Independence. In this he must have been inspired by Lincoln himself, who, in maintaining that slavery was wrong, appealed over the head of the Constitution (by which slavery was permitted) to the Declaration of Independence (by which it was logically forbidden):

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