Republican Senator, Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee commented positively on President Obama's speech in Cairo. Unlike many of his fellow GOP members, Lugar, in an interview on Bloomberg TV used his head not his partisanship, when he stated that Obama's speech was a "signal achievement."
These days most GOP Congressmen and Senators, along with their followers at FOX TV and the bombastic buffoons on talk radio work mostly out of context and feel that they are showing weakness if they say anything positive about the other side. Maybe that is the case...or maybe they simply are not smart enough to know better. Whatever the case, at least there are a few statesmanlike members still around with enough courage and sense to say what is right.
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7 comments:
Have you forgot all the hate Bush comments made and now no media ever gave him credit for anything good?
You have selective memory, but not everyone does.
What has Bush and the media got to do with this, other than the fact that Bush did nothing to engender good will among Arabs until his last few months in office?
As Senator from IN, Dick Lugar is my neighbor, sorta. I like him as a GOP moderate and hope that he'll vote for healthcare reform, cap and trade, and support Obama's efforts to end nuclear weapons.
Bush was the worst president we ever had. He was a loser,a liar, an arrogant, stupid leader. I say it and history will write it again and again. The GOP has members who will admit truths just because it is so, but they are only the brave.
Good post, GA Mtn Man. It's great to know there are still statesmen (on either side of the aisle) who put the good of the country ahead of politics.
Obama's speech was pretty good. As a feminist, I was disappointed that he ignored the killings, execution and mass rape going on in so many uslim countries and spoke as if women's rights were all about the right to wear a hijab! Otherwise, I thought he did well building a bridge between nations/cultures and extending hope for increased cooperation.
Click over to my blog for great link to Jeff Sessions tribute to Bama Judge Frank Johnson with implications for the way Sessions is lesser Republican than Lugar and Johnson and how Sessions may have boxxed himself in with his own words as he approaches the Sotomayor hearings.
Sorn June 9, 2009 2:13 PM
Mr. C.
When you say that “Institutions, traditions and the past belong to those with power” I have to disagree. The past does not belong to those with power any more than the air is the property of the birds that fly in it. The past, together with its institutions and traditions is the common property of all men and women. At various points in time those traditions have privileged the powerful over the weak, but those same traditions and institutions have also stood for social justice, for the rights of humankind, and for the freedom of the weak and powerless to stand up to authority when that authority is seen to be overbearing.
The same nation that defended slavery and Jim Crow also gave us William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold Speech. The same Harry S. Truman who privately used the N word all his life was the same man who integrated the Armed Services. The same Catholic Church that sat by while the holocaust was under-way is the same church that has opportunities for poor people to go to school for centuries. The same Lyndon Johnson who rammed the Civil Rights Act through congress is the same man who voted against every piece of civil rights legislation until 1957. The same system of slavery that perpetuated grave injustices against people also gave rise to every form of music that we think of as quintessentially American.
No offense but I have come to expect more nuance from you. There isn’t any hard and fast rule that says that conservatives are always on the side of the powerful, and that liberals are always on the side of the downtrodden. Life is much more complex than that. At base the human condition contains within itself both the capacity for great good as well as great injustice. The history of our institutions, traditions, and our past reflect do not reflect the victory of the powerful over the powerless as much as they reveal the complexity, of human life. Our lives as they are lived do not contain within themselves a system of Manichean dualism where the forces of light are constantly at war with the forces of darkness. People do good things for bad reasons and bad things for good reasons. We are in short a damn mess and our institutions, traditions, and history reflect if anything the fallibility of human nature.
The above quote came from a comment today at theatlantic.com.
I thought it worthy of your audience here.
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