FDR's first Inaugural Address 1933.

"We now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective." - from FDR's First Inaugural Address, 1933

I was driving home from delivering my daughter's car to her in Pennsylvania this past Monday and I was listening to the radio. Larry Kudlow was on and he used a phrase that stunned me. He said, (words to the effect), that it was just one more example of "The War against the War" taking place here in the United States.

It affected me so immediately that I had to turn the radio off...so I could process the thoughts that were running through my brain! So many things hit me at once...an overload of examples that I couldn't shake out of my head! He's right. There's a war against the war and the media, the press, and our own courts are fighting it!

• Senator Rockefeller saying that President Bush was "a bigger terrorist than Saddam Hussein." (Gee Senator, I bet that plays well on Al Jazeera!)
• Matt Lauer (the Glib one) repeatedly trying to get the President to admit to using torture against terrorist detainees. (On the Morning of 9/11 Fifth Anniversary no less!) ("Hey Matt would you call killing almost 3000 American citizens by flying commercial airliners into buildings torture?")
• The ACLU and certain Federal Courts Judges trying to have "constitutional rights" conferred on terrorists being held in Guantanimo Bay.
• Rep. John Murtha who originally said early in 2005 that "a premature withdrawal of our troops based on a political timetable could rapidly devolve into a civil war which would leave America's foreign policy in disarray as countries question not only America's judgment but also its perseverance." But who now wants us to withdraw to Okinawa."We can redeploy there almost instantly." (Ouch! That makes my brain hurt! Senator...excuse me, that's 4,899 miles. INSTANTLY???)
• Senator Harry Reid who said on March 22,2006..."We've been in Iraq longer than we were in World War II." (And we've accomplished more - in a comparable period of time - while loosing hundreds of thousands fewer soldiers Senator. What's your point? Did you think this was going to be easy? The Israeli's can do 6-day wars, we have to earn our victories.)
• Again Senator Harry Reid, waving his finger at the audience (who else did that?) amid cheers from Democratic supporters saying, "Think about what happened 20 minutes ago in the Senate. We killed the Patriot Act!" (And this has made your grand children and my children safer how Senator?)

With deep deference to FDR, who after this first Inaugural seemingly carried this country on his back - crippled legs notwithstanding - to one of the greatest united efforts the world has ever seen, I have to ask - what ever happened to that country? What ever happened to that united and loyal army of citizens that Roosevelt knew was there, "willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline?" One thing's an absolute certainty, it's not anywhere near Congress!

Yesterday I also learned that there's going to be a movie released shortly that shows the assassination of President Bush. Now there's something that Hollywood can be proud of! I anticipate that there will be those on the Democrat side who will say that because ABC aired "The Path to 9/11" over the objections of former President Clinton, a Bush assassination is just fine. Could we ever be further apart here?

On the day that the still healing wounds of 9/11 were still raw and painful...OUR President tried once again to comfort grieving families, to assure us that our fallen hero's haven't died in vain, and that all of our efforts are important and required for the ongoing fight against global terrorism, and what do I hear?

I hear from Senator Reid...."He is more consumed by staying the course in Iraq and playing election-year politics." I hear from Senator Kennedy...."The president should be ashamed of using a national day of mourning to commandeer the airwaves to give a speech that was designed not to unite the country and commemorate the fallen but to seek support for a war in Iraq that he has admitted had nothing to do with 9/11." And finally in his Op-Ed piece in the Sunday Times there was this last paragraph "Bush Bashing" from Frank Rich...."And so here we are five years later. Fearmongering remains unceasing. So do tax cuts. So does the war against a country that did not attack us on 9/11. We have moved on, but no one can argue we have moved ahead."

Well wait a minute Frank! I can argue it. And so can the millions of other Americans who understand that freedom is never free and demands sacrifices of us all. Has there been another attack on U.S. soil Frank, haven't we helped free the populations of two countries from totalitarian governments? The millions of Americans who understand that Saddam Hussein's regime had fostered terrorism in the past; had used WMD's against its own Kurdish citizens, and would be just as willing to use them against us or someone else....we can all argue it Frank!

And so (I think) would FDR. He understood the magnitude of the task that faced him when he took office. Bread lines - a roaring depression - Fascism rising in Italy & Germany. And later, he must have been pulling his hair out after Pearl Harbor! But FDR understood what so many of the media, so many of his opposition, so many around the world didn't understand. He understood that the fear of loosing, could paralyze us as easily as the polio that paralyzed him, and could bring about our ultimate defeat. He understood that his best chance to move us forward - perhaps our only chance - in this monumental uphill battle we were about to embark on, was to unite together and kick fear and Fascism dead in the face! We believed him - rallied behind his call & accomplished that!

I swear, George Bush could fly over to Pakistan, walk into a cave and drag Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri out by the scruffs of their necks, kick their asses all the way back to "Ground Zero" in New York, all the while having a bottle in his back pocket labeled "Cure for AIDS & Cancer," and the media and the liberal left would say..."See, he had them all the time and was just waiting for the election!"

Focus for a minute folks - let's see if your "logic chips" are still working - if anybody and everybody who is - screaming against the war in Iraq and decrying every single thing George Bush is doing now or has tried to do during his presidency - would put 50% of that animosity, no, make it 25% of that animosity toward supporting the United efforts of the President, his policies and the military......How much closer to defeating global terrorism and ending this war do you think we'd be?

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