David Brooks has been a welcome addition to the NY Times Op-Ed page. Today, he comments on Dean's foreign policy speech (given near Rodeo Drive -- you can almost hear Brooks exclaiming "Puh-leeze!"). He proceeds to sum up the key defining distinction between how Bush and Dean approach the war on terrorism:
Bush believes that God has endowed all human beings with certain inalienable rights, the most important of which is liberty. Every time he is called upon to utter an unrehearsed thought, he speaks of the war on terror as a conflict between those who seek to advance liberty to realize justice, and those who oppose the advance of liberty: radical Islamists who fear religious liberty, dictators who fear political liberty and reactionaries who fear liberty for women.[...]
The world Dean described is largely devoid of grand conflicts or moral, cultural and ideological divides. It is a world without passionate nationalism, a world in which Europe and the United States are not riven by any serious cultural differences, in which sensible people from around the globe would find common solutions, if only Bush weren't so unilateral.
At first, the Bush worldview seems far more airy-fairy and idealistic. The man talks about God, and good versus evil. But in reality, Dean is the more idealistic and naïve one. Bush at least recognizes the existence of intellectual and cultural conflict. He acknowledges that different value systems are incompatible.
Exactly.
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