David Frum: "Years later, I wrote of the George W. Bush administration: 'The Bush administration opened with a second Pearl Harbor, ended with a second Great Crash and contained a second Vietnam in the middle'. My own role in the administration was both brief and modest.... Yet because the administration is so widely perceived as unsuccessful, it feels cowardly to remark this truth, as if I were looking for some kind of personal exit. I came away from my Bush experiences with two resolutions : 1) Never to let any group do any iota of my thinking for me. If I lacked the expertise to think something through for myself, then I wouldn't have an opinion about it at all. 2) To devote more of my own personal political thinking to the question of what citizens of a modern nation owe each other. Which is why the headline that is on my mind this day pertains not to the past, but to the present.... Inevitably, the impress of 9/11 must fade. My youngest daughter was born a month afterward.... Her generation will have its own memorial days. We can't bequeath our memories to them, and it would be oppressive if we could. Instead, let's bequeath them a better country, where fewer die by the gun and more have care when they need it...
#noted #2019-09-23
