Very respectful post!

Yes Anthony. Here’s to questioning authority!

Cheers

Phillip,

With apologies to John Henry, I clean up the posts that everyone posts. Meaning fixing fonts, paragraphs, but not the content. So I thought to get a better pic of President Obama.

“Here’s to questioning authority!”

It is my understanding that dissent is no longer the highest form of patriotism.

“It is my understanding that dissent is no longer the highest form of patriotism.”

Bummer dude! I guess I’ll have to inhale now.

Portions of it could have been written by Ronald Reagan.

Yep, like the “We will not apologize for our way of life” part!

I think Douthat basically captures my vague unease with the speech, although I’ll admit it had some nice moments…

The speech, I thought, was a sometimes-dissonant, sometimes-successful attempt to marry expansiveness and sobriety. The language of realism was woven throughout – “our collective failure to make hard choices … the time has come to set aside childish things …the challenges we face … will not be met easily or in a short span of time” – and there was, as Maggie Gallagher put it, an “old-school Protestant” element to much of Obama’s rhetoric, from the calls to duty and responsibility, to the promise to marry “hope and virtue,” to the praise for the work ethic and criticisms of ” those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.” But time and again, Obama pivoted from this theme to the sort of begin-the-world-anew rhetoric that we’ve come to expect from all our presidents, liberal and conservative alike – promising that hard choices are really false choices, that pragmatism can overcome partisanship, that there’s no technological hurdle that Science can’t leap, and that all those nameless “cynics” who worry about hubris, overreach and decline don’t understand that in the brave new age of Obama, their pessimistic instincts “no longer apply.” His description of our straits was sometimes Carteresque, in other words – but his prognosis tilted, inevitably, toward a liberal version of Morning in America.

Perhaps I’m a bit too prickly, but I thought I discerned some backhanded slaps at his predecessor which I considered unseemly. And if I were an Obama advisor, I would recommend not inviting Rev. Lowry back for any more public addresses.

Right . . . Michael’s command of the New Testament is such that he probably really does think there’s a verse commanding “yellow” people to be “mellow.”

Hey Phillip – What the hell does Obama’s abortion policy have to do with Lowery’s speech?

Though I’d rather take a bit of non-Christian racism than a lot of non-Christian abortion of babies.

[Ed. Note: Please keep on topic. The point of the thread was to offer sincere congratulations to President Obama. I don't mind occasional digressions, but his position on abortion does not need thorough treatment here.]

No worries. Not a big deal.