All Intensive Purposes

Via Juan Non-Volokh, I see that, writing in the LA Times about the importance of history, David Gelernter writes:

And I know college students who have heard of President Kennedy but not of anything he ever did except get assassinated. They have never heard JFK's inaugural promise: that America would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and the success of liberty." But President Bush remembers that speech, and it's lucky he does.

If President Bush remembers the speech, he doesn't remember it very well. Kennedy led by warning Americans that they might have to make sacrifices "to ensure the survival and success of liberty." Bush is too weak a leader to ask for such sacrifice, so we get wartime tax cuts and deficit spending. We get National Guardsmen and Reservists forced to extended service and no draft. He is all about having our cake and eating it too. No one will be quoting Bush's inaugural addresses in forty years; they are full of easy ideas, not great ones.

FWIW, I agree with Juan and Gelernter more generally about the importance of history.