Choosing liberty

Over time, free nations grow stronger and dictatorships grow weaker…Freedom honors and unleashes human creativity — and creativity determines the strength and wealth of nations. Liberty is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here on Earth.“

— PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
November 6, 2003

This is the flip side of Hugo Chavez’ crackdown in Venezuela: Gateway Pundit notes that in China, a state-sponsored tv station has been hacked into, and anti-government messages were broadcast. Interesting!

What was it President Bush has been crying out, since 9/11? What has be been saying, and saying, and saying, and saying, and saying, before the press and the Dems managed to completely obfuscate his message and (sadly, with his help) his presidency?

Oh, yeah…if you read those links, you read it again and again: People will always choose LIBERTY. The human soul desires LIBERTY.

As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world.
President George W. Bush, to the Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 2001.

Yes…the speech he made after 9/11, before the visionary Whitehall speech, which was never even replayed on C-Span. Go back and read it. It’s easy to forget what the president, and the War on Terror is all about, when you never see or hear about these things.

More thoughts on liberty – it’s sweetness, its benefits, its costs – from Wretchard and from Vanderleun. And Bookworm and Flopping Aces both link to Christopher Hitchen’s interesting assessment of what the election of Sarko, and his appointments in France, portend. It’s all about liberty, in one way or another. Writes Hitchens:

But the initial phrase, about the relationship between duty and protection, was, I believe, coined by Bernard Kouchner, who now forces us to rethink our glib counterposition between unilateralism on the one hand and passivity and acquiescence—even complicity—on the other. I suppose there is some irony to be found in the fact that, while such a person takes command of the foreign policy of France, the only apparent test of liberalism in the United States is the speed with which it proposes to abandon the Arabs and Kurds of Iraq once again.

Brits At Their Best recalls an encounter with tyranny and says it succinctly:

Hearing my grandmother whisper about the government in the dark, walking through once-beautiful crumbling towns, meeting the anxious, envious, hopeless eyes of everyone I met on the street, I gained a different impression of those “workers’ paradises” where everyone had free health care but no one wanted to live.

Meanwhile, SnappedShot provides us with pictures of an “election” only a tyrant could love.

Related: Bush Dances with Free People; Albright Danced with Kim Jong Il