July 25, 2006

We are Already in a Religious War

By Bookworm
Five days after 9/11, George Bush stated "This crusade, this war on terrorism is gonna take awhile. And the American people must be patient. I'm gonna be patient." America has been running from that speech ever since. It doesn't matter that George Bush used the word "crusade," not in a religious sense, but in a more literary, erudite sense, to mean "a vigorous concerted movement for a cause or against an abuse."  Because the President is known to be a religious man, his detractors and our enemies abroad have latched onto that single word to characterize all of America's subsequent actions in the Middle East as a Christian crusade.  (See, for example, this The Nation article,  in which the author crows about President Bush's ineptitude in allying himself with the medieval Crusaders, something that had "Bush already reading from [Osama Bin Laden's] script.") These attacks against Bush's (in retrospect) poor choice of words mean that America has vigorously and...(Read Full Article)