NYC Letter: A Few Appropriate Remarks

As patriotic* left-of-left-center** moderates† in Congress struggle to find the magic wording for "did our best/time's up/had enough" withdrawal legislation (HR 571 was defeated Friday, 403-3) to quit the fight for liberty in Iraq, it is well to remember that moderates do not accomplish great things. When they achieve, they achieve in moderation, which is to say, not too much.

And today's fainting moderates, once lifted from the floor, achieve, by design, ever so much less. Unless the measure is set very small, you would be forgiven if you thought they achieve nothing at all.

Yesterday one hundred forty-two years ago, an immoderate man was asked to make a few appropriate remarks at the consecration of America's bloodiest battlefield. He used the occasion to urge on more war, more sacrifice, till the bloody business of war achieved what moderation had failed to accomplish. Freedom and equality in freedom.

After a deadening two-hour peroration, Edward Everett, America's speechifier of the moment, yielded the stage to Abraham Lincoln, who in the compass of 300 words and in two to three minutes delivered a plain-spoken argument for the obligations incumbent on a nation professing the freedom of its peoples. We give the argument in full below:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.‡

Later in this long engagement, war-weary moderates sought to withdraw emancipation as a condition of peace, thinking an easy peace in part today better than the hard peace in full tomorrow. They were refused by Mr. Lincoln.

Who in Congress today would stand up and say America is the worse for Mr. Lincoln's long war?

For those who think the commonweal should not be too inconvenienced by high principles, we only ask that you stop pretending to high principles.

Or, we invite you to remove to the more congenial climes of France, where principles are a fashion, as changeable as hats.

* We remark their patriotism so we may not be accused of impugning it.
** Reading the wire services, we have ascertained this to be the political locus where moderates huddle.
† This term is applied to folk deemed applaudable by the wire services, neither left nor right, though more left than right, and possessing progressive principles that can shape themselves to the correct stand on the issues as reported by the wire services.
‡The Chicago Sun-Times found this less than Miltonic:

The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.

UPDATE 11.21.05: Mark Steyn spanks the Senate. Bravo. Worth the full read.

And, before they huff, "How dare you question my patriotism?", well, yes, I am questioning your patriotism -- because you're failing to meet the challenge of the times. Thanks to you, Iraq is a quagmire -- not in the Sunni Triangle, where U.S. armed forces are confident and effective, but on the home front, where soft-spined national legislators have turned the war into one almighty Linguini Triangle.