Worth noting: This may be the one time in the history of the universe that I agree with Peggy Noonan, who points out that Bush's inaugural had "way too much God" in it:
"It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike... marked by deep moral seriousness and no moral modesty... [it] left this Bush supporter yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance...."
"This world is not heaven. The president's speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech... The speech did not deal with specifics--9/11, terrorism, particular alliances, Iraq. It was, instead, assertively abstract...."
"Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it's earth....The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not."
There you have it: The Bush inaugural marked the final transition of the Bush-family ideology from old-school conservatism, with its abhorrence of abstract schemes of human perfectibility, to a messianic idealism so divorced from reality it gives even sympathizers like Noonan the willies. Bush's vision of human perfectibility may be shaped by born-again fervor rather than socialist theory, but that difference doesn't make its collision with reality any less dangerous.
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