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Inauguration Sledding Day: My Election Day foray into politics was enough for me. Driven not so much by an affection for George Bush as my abject terror of a Kerry presidency (pretty well encapsulated in this image), I did it as one might crawl into a sewer to save a trapped child. Much showering followed later, until I used it my poll-watching stint as a way to con my way into one of the best seats in the Ronald Reagan Building for the victory speech. More showering followed that night. I was not born to be a starry-eyed political hack, wear funny hats, hold banners with peoples’ names on them, or chant slogans. Nor do I wish to stand in the cold for hours with fifty thousand other people, only to end up looking at the back of a taller man’s jacket. Snow in Washington means that God means for us to sled, not to drive.

But hey, it’s not too great an inconvenience for me to read the papers:

“We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” Mr. Bush says in one excerpt. “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” “In a world moving toward liberty,” the President goes on to say, “we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.”

You have to credit the man for throwing me at least one of the bones for which I salivated.

UPDATE: I also liked this quote (from TV): “One day, this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of the earth.” You don’t have to stretch far to believe that North Korea is high on the list of places he must have had in mind. For evidence of my point, note that Bush has been reading Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy, about which I blogged here previously. North Korea is Sharansky’s laboratory of absolute oppression in the book. The new tape of the North Korean dissenters and this small sample of opinion suggest that Sharansky may know what he’s talking about. Could North Korea’s discontent be near its critical mass? Will Bush’s words reach the desperate in Hamhung, Chongjin, and in the Wonsan ghetto?

AFTERTHOUGHT: This was not a speech for the calculating realists, the advocates of today’s self-interested compromises (and architects of tomorrow’s grievances). This was full-throated idealism with everything but the blue face paint. Those wishing for a chastened Bush to retreat from idealism or from his Hegelian belief that democracy will advance, even if imperfectly, will be disappointed. Bush’s rhetoric was the talk of a man who means to incite revolution.

His greatest challenge may prove to be the myopia born of our own soft, free lives.