WE:

The State of the Union (President George W. Bush, Jan. 28, 2003, Jewish World Review)

Many challenges, abroad and at home, have arrived in a single season. In two years, America has gone from a sense of invulnerability to an awareness of peril, from bitter division in small matters to calm unity in great causes.

And we go forward with confidence, because this call of history has come to the right country.

Americans are a resolute people, who have risen to every test of our time. Adversity has revealed the character of our country, to the world, and to ourselves.

America is a strong nation and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.

Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity.

We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving god behind all of life and all of history. May he guide us now, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.

Thank you.

The humility here is striking. Note the "small matters", an implicit reference to the dispute over whether he or Al Gore would be president. Whether true or not, it's an especially nice touch to suggest that it ultimately mattered less than things like our national security. Also, the point that liberty is the birthright of all Creation, rather than something America, or any other government, dispenses, is a welcome harkening back to first principles. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 29, 2003 10:43 AM