From one year ago next week. I'm going to email her and ask her if she'll write an anniversary column re-evaluating what she has written here, especially the part I highlighted.
http://www.peggynoonan.com/article.php?article=115Back With a Roar
George W. Bush is back, big time. In fact with a roar.
He seemed to lie low this summer, but Wednesday he re-emerged to lead the nation and stand for all it has been through this year. He spoke of mourning and memory, of our purpose and our plans. He was inspiriting.
Did you see him with the families of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, and then with the mourners in New York, at Ground Zero? He was a genuine comfort. A genuine one. He understood it was about them and not him, and in each case he gave the families what they signaled they needed. If they wanted to talk he stopped and talked; when they wanted to hug him and weep, he took them in his arms. He was there to serve, to give and to represent. Even now, two years after the previous president, it is still a relief—an enormous relief—to have a president who doesn’t make every event a sickness-tinged drama in which he simulates emotions he does not feel and draws the cameras with the heat of his need, his persona, his never-sated ego. Smarmy bathos is gone. Thanks again, God.
But let’s go to yesterday and Mr. Bush’s speech at the U.N. It was big and it was shrewd in its rhetorical approach. The U.N. expected Mr. Bush to make the case for an invasion of Iraq based on Saddam’s threat to the security of the United States. Mr. Bush didn’t do that. Saddam he said, as if noting the obvious, “has made the case against himself.”
Saddam has brazenly and consistently defied the United Nations. Saddam endangers the peace the U.N. member states so understandably desire. Saddam threatens them. But it’s all right: The United States will come to the U.N.’s aid and protect its member states from Saddam.
It was something. And it left the administration’s foes in the audience looking, at the end, as if they were thinking: Man, how do I knock this one down?
much more...