George W. Bush, speaking yesterday in Ohio, on what he has learned in the presidency:
I’ve learned to expect the unexpected because history can deliver sudden horror from a soft autumn sky.
I have found you better know what you believe, or risk being tossed to and fro by the flattery of friends or the chorus of critics.
I’ve been grateful for the lessons I’ve learned from my parents: respect every person, do your best, live every day to its fullest.
And I’ve been strengthened by my faith and humbled by its reminder that my life is part of a much bigger story.
You could almost put those into the Pirke Avot.
Perhaps this might be an appropriate time to remind ourselves of the obligation of gratitude. Or as Mark Steyn, writing in The Spectator (U.K), put it yesterday:
Given that [George W. Bush] is already damned as a tool of the Jews by such star ignoramuses of British diplomacy as Sir Ivor Roberts, Her Majesty’s man in Rome, and Sir Crispin Tickell [sic] in these very pages, the least the sinister Hebrews could do is show a little more enthusiasm for their puppet in the voting booth.
Just a small per cent in the right place — retirees in New Mexico, for example — would pay off very nicely.