Good intentions are not enough when you're running the country (and

I keep picking on poor Andrew Sullivan. It's not fair of me, I know. But he embodies the frustrating tendency to say what so many keep saying about President Bush, which is some variety of "I know he's totally f**ked everything up, but he's a really nice guy and he gives pretty speeches."

Item: today's post on Bush's inaugural speech.

The speech was a deep rebuke to conservative foreign policy realists. Its fundamental point, it seems to me, is that security is only possible through the expansion of liberty abroad. In the long run, that's indisputable. In the short run, there are sometimes trade-offs to be made. What Bush was saying was that he will not trade liberty for security. Translation: he will stick to the democratization of Iraq. That was the main point of the address on the major policy issue in front of us. In that sense, it was an old-style liberal speech, about as far from the conservative tradition in foreign policy as can be imagined. And at its most ambitious, it was a fusion of liberal internationalism with realism - saying that the latter cannot be secured without the former. It was ecumenical; and it was rightly thematic. If I could offer one criticism, I'd say it could have been shorter. There were times when the liberty theme became repetitive. And, of course, the relationship of rhetoric to reality is, as always with Bush, problematic. How do you reconcile the expansion of freedom with Bush's expansion of government? How do you square domestic freedom with the curtailment of civil liberties in a war on terror? How do you proclaim that America is a force for freeing dissidents, when the government now has unprecedented powers to detain anyone suspected of terror across the globe and subject them to coercive interrogation techniques that the government will not disclose? Perhaps these questions do not need to be answered in an inaugural address. But they linger in the air, even as Bush's eloquence and idealism lifts you up and gives you hope.

The problem is that that little aside IS the very heart of the problem. It's not incidental to the speech that Bush says one thing and the effects of his policy are quite another. This is the story of his presidency, and it's a terrible story. There's a word for what Bush does... it's "hypocrisy." It's what George Orwell was talking about in 1984. It's lying to the American people. It doesn't matter that he's probably lying to himself at the same time.

We all fool ourselves sometimes about the consequences of our actions. It's not a good thing, but for normal people with a small sphere of influence, it only hurts ourselves, or a few loved ones. When you're president, it affects billions of people. There's no room for this kind of error.

Sorry, his benefit of the doubt got used up about three or four years ago.