Archive for August, 2004

What’s Important to President Bush?

I’m learning more about what makes Bush tick, and I’m disturbed by what I’m finding.

Let’s start with the conventional wisdom, which I believe is accurate, but incomplete. It describes his top down, highly insular management style and general lack of curiosity:

While President Clinton consumed vast amounts of daily reading, President Bush has established a much more hierarchical White House with information moving up the ranks, analysts say. “Presidents vary in how curious they are and how far down they reach in terms of the advice they get,” says Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University. “President Bush has a top down management style…” - Christian Science Monitor, 4/15/04

He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious and as a result ill-informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be. - David Frum, former Bush speechwriter

DIANE SAWYER: First of all, I just want to ask about reading. Mr. President, you know that there was a great deal of reporting about the fact that you said, first of all, that you let Condoleezza Rice and Andrew Card give you a flavor of what’s in the news.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes.

DIANE SAWYER: That you don’t read the stories yourself.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes. I get my news from people who don’t editorialize. They give me the actual news, and it makes it easier to digest, on a daily basis, the facts.

DIANE SAWYER: Is it just harder to read constant criticism or to read -

PRESIDENT BUSH: Why even put up with it when you can get the facts elsewhere? I’m a lucky man. I’ve got, it’s not just Condi and Andy, it’s all kinds of people in my administration who are charged with different responsibilities, and they come in and say this is what’s happening, this isn’t what’s happening. - ABC interview with President Bush, 12/16/03

“I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.” - Fox News interview with President Bush, 9/22/03

Looking a little deeper, there is more to it than this, however. Bush is capable of curiosity and doing his own investigation, but only when he encounters something that intrigues him. I have only been able to find two instances of this - stem cell research, and his campaign:

Ironically, Greenstein says that Bush was beginning to move outside that hierarchical style in the summer of 2001 - but directed his attention toward stem cells, and not a historic terrorist threat. “There was a lot of concern about whether George W. was really up to speed in the eight months leading up to 9/11,” Greenstein says. “One of the signs that he was locking into the job and not winging it and treating it as if he were still a C student at Yale was his interest in stem cell research. He did what you don’t associate with him: reaching out to other people. When they talked to him about other subjects, he asked them about stem cells.” - Christian Science Monitor, 4/15/04

Several aides said Mr. Bush viewed this as the campaign of his life and had intervened on matters as large as the themes it should strike and as small as particular shots of him in his television advertisements. In particular, aides said, Mr. Bush has, along with Mr. Rove, been a driving force behind the attacks that have become a hallmark of his campaign since Mr. Kerry emerged from the spring primaries as the Democratic candidate…

As Mr. Bush was flying from Texas to New Mexico on Thursday, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, turned to him on Air Force One and suggested that Albuquerque was heavily Democratic, White House aides said. Mr. Bush responded by saying the city was split politically, and he talked about the importance of its suburban counties…

On weekdays, aides say, the campaign essentially begins in the White House residence, where Mr. Bush rises at 5 a.m. to read the newspapers and check on the political news. By 7 a.m., when he is in the Oval Office, aides say, Mr. Bush will frequently tell them about an article they have not seen and tell them to call the reporter and complain. - New York Times, 8/29/04

But he still has his limits:

Rove said he typically went to Mr. Bush in the morning with a list of as many as two dozen topics and political questions scrawled in longhand. Mr. Bush is very engaged at the beginning of the conversation, but begins to flag before long, Mr. Rove said. “He’ll say, ‘You’re running out of airspeed and altitude,’ ” Mr. Rove said. - New York Times, 8/29/04

What’s maddening to me is that Bush did not choose to get involved with acquiring a similar degree of knowledge and expertise in understanding what was really going on in Iraq, before the invasion:

The [CIA's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq] had concluded (wrongly) that Hussein had WMDs, but it also contained information contrary to that finding. Anyone who read the full NIE - which was only 90 pages long - would have seen that the case was not a slam dunk and that analysts within the intelligence community disputed key portions of the case.
Did Bush bother to read the NIE before deciding to launch the invasion of Iraq? No. Who says so? The White House. The day it declassified parts of the NIE, a senior administration official held a background briefing for reporters, who were not allowed to reveal this official’s name. Here is an excerpt from that July 18, 2003 briefing:

QUESTION: When did the President read this NIE?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I’m sorry. The President has been briefed on more than - countless conversations with his national - with intelligence community about the contents of the NIE. I don’t think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it. But he’s familiar, intimately familiar with the case because he based his decisions on the case that is both included in this and information that probably was not included in this.

QUESTION: So this would have been read, presumably, by the National Security Advisor [Condoleezza Rice], and then she would have briefed the President on it?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Again, we have experts who work for the National Security Advisor who would know this information, who understand this information. He relies upon his administration, the CIA, themselves, as well, to give their best judgments. And that’s what took place.

QUESTION: Can you square the one circle? Last week, the National Security Advisor told us that neither she, nor the President were aware of any concerns about the quality of the intelligence underlying this allegation. Given that it is a footnote, it’s one of six opinions, but the fact that in this NIE there is expressed concern that this is of dubious quality, how is it possible that the National Security Advisor and the President would not have been aware of those reservations?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document.

Bush did not read the NIE on Iraq. Neither did Rice. And the reference to “footnotes” is misleading. When NIEs are produced, analysts from different intelligence services come together to try to draft a consensus document. If a service disagrees with the conclusions reached by others, it “takes a footnote.” These “footnotes” are not necessarily buried at the back of the document. Often they are highlighted. Anyone who reads an NIE seriously cannot avoid the “footnotes.” Had Bush and Rice read the NIE on Iraq they would have come across several “footnotes” that should have caused them to question the overall findings. - David Corn, 7/8/04 (and here’s the complete transcript)

According to the New York Times, [Senator Bob Graham - a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee] was one of the few members of the Senate who saw the national intelligence estimate that was the basis for Bush’s decisions. After reviewing it, Graham requested that the Bush administration declassify the information before the Senate voted on the administration’s resolution requesting use of the military in Iraq.

But rather than do so, CIA Director Tenet merely sent Graham a letter discussing the findings. Graham then complained that Tenet’s letter only addressed “findings that supported the administration’s position on Iraq,” and ignored information that raised questions about intelligence. In short, Graham suggested that the Administration, by cherrypicking only evidence to its own liking, had manipulated the information to support its conclusion.

Recent statements by one of the high-level officials privy to the decision making process that lead to the Iraqi war also strongly suggest manipulation, if not misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair magazine, said: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.” More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that “[t]he country swims on a sea of oil.” - CNN.com Law Center web site

Having a leader who receives information solely from an insular group of advisors - who themselves cherry-pick information sources that suit their preconceptions - sounds more like what you’d expect from an oligarchy or a dictatorship, not a democracy. (In regard to Iraq, here are some more sources for this argument: Was Bush fixated on ‘getting Saddam’?, The Manipulator, Did one woman’s obsession take America to war?, and Going into Iraq.)

Obviously Bush has the ability to step outside of the hierarchy he created and obtain information however he chooses. But, as far as I can tell, he has only displayed such initiative on the stem-cell research issue (which I imagine piqued his interest due to its religious implications) and his own presidential campaign. Where was his curiosity and information-gathering initiative when he was weighing the evidence to justify invading Iraq?

The Terrible Threes

There is no such thing as the terrible twos. It’s the terrible threes that you have to look out for. This is the age when kids really start experimenting with different behaviors, as they observe how others behave and try to “find themselves.” That means it’s the age where they start picking up things from other kids. For example, Kai has discovered the phrase “that’s not fair!” which he now uses whenever he doesn’t get what he wants, right now.

I haven’t blogged much this past week as Kai has been running us ragged. After a nice long stretch of being a “good sleeper,” he has reverted to his old habit of being a “bad sleeper.” He’s taking a long time to fall asleep each night, and asking us to come in his room for one thing or another every 5 minutes. It’s sometimes tricky knowing when to indulge him and when not to, as his eczema is a genuine problem, and he’ll scratch himself to the point of bleeding if we don’t keep him properly lotioned and potioned. And he’s off diapers completely now, so we strongly encourage him to use the toilet when needed. So, in order to prolong bedtime, he’s happy to maximize the leverage these two things give him. And then he’s waking up numerous times throughout the night.

He had his first public tantrum at a grocery store on Saturday (until now he’s always restricted his tantrums to the privacy of our home). But on Sunday he was good, and he slept well last night, so hopefully this was just a rough week, and not a sign of things to come.

Summer Kai Pictures

Here are some pictures we’ve taken here and there since coming back from Newport in June:

Freaky

The Toogle site is a fun image search engine. If you type in Mike Toppa, you get a picture of my cousin, Mike Toppa. Better him than me

AIM Users Beware

If you use AOL instant messenger, it has probably installed a program called wildtangent on your system. This is an online gaming plugin. According to the company that makes it, it’s not doing anything pernicious. But spyany.com says it that will share your name, address, phone number and email address (if it can get them, presumably from your AOL profile) and track your software product usage. They also tell you how to uninstall it.

What’s interesting is that AOL didn’t modify their EULA to cover the inclusion of wildtangent until after they began distributing it with AIM. So even if you actually bothered to read the fine print, you wouldn’t have known about it.

I discovered wildtangent installing itself on my system when my spybot system monitor caught it trying to make changes to my system registry. I’ve been refusing my AIM client’s recent attempts to upgrade itself, but that apparently doesn’t stop the wildtangent installation from happening. If you’re using Windows, I highly recommend spybot - you can download it for free.

The Brains Thing

This is a must-read: The Brains Thing - Three years of watching Bush makes the point: Intelligence matters more than “character.” It mentions something I had forgotten about: the State Department’s Future of Iraq group, which was given $5 million before the Iraqi invasion to assess what would happen, and what would be needed, in a post-invasion Iraq. They predicted that we would need to be on guard against looting in the immediate aftermath of the invasion (we weren’t, and looting was rampant), that the Iraqis very well might not greet us with open arms, that the 400,000-strong Iraqi army should not be reduced in size until there were new jobs for the soldiers (instead we completely disbanded the Iraqi army), that we should be prepared for the complexities of the intertwining of religion and politics in Iraq, and that the infrastructure (water, electrical, etc.) was in far worse shape than the Pentagon was planning for. It’s obvious now that none of this advise was heeded, and reading “The Brains Thing” provides some insight as to why.

Technorati is Broken

You may have noticed I added a link to Technorati in the right-hand column about six weeks ago. I have removed it. Technorati is supposed to be the Google of blogs. The trouble is, it doesn’t work. I have repeatedly tried to “claim” my blog, but it never goes through. When I try to sign in, my password never works (I end up having to reset it every time I want to sign in). I’ve attempted to change my contact email address with them 3 times, and it never sticks (it keeps reverting back to the email address I initially signed up with). At first I thought maybe they were having a bad day, but I’ve tried several times over the past month or so, and I have the same trouble every time. The idea behind their site is cool, but the implementation is a disaster.

Quiet in the Peanut Gallery

I’m turning off the “comment” feature for a while. For now, please provide comments via the email link on your right. I’m being hit with some automated spam script that’s throwing about 100 spam comments at my site every day. Since I’ve upgraded to Movable Type 3, they no longer appear on the site, which is good (as I have to approve them first), but I still have to go through and manually delete them from the queue every day.

What I’ll do next is upgrade my templates too (I’m still using the Movable Type 2 templates) and then I can require folks to register before they can post comments. I really didn’t want to go there, as I like keeping this as an open forum, but I have to do something to stem the tide of spam.

Distractions

It’s always a challenge keeping my hobbies under control. My blogging has slowed down as I’ve been distracted by experimenting with my new DVD burner and iPod, building a web site for Maria, and working in the yard.

Maria and Kai visited her folks in Denver last week. They had a great trip, but they lost many of Kai’s DVDs on the plane. Previously, he’s also had DVDs that became unplayable due to scratches. So I’ve invested in a DVD burner so I can make back up copies of his DVDs (well, after we buy or rent the originals again anyway). Unfortunately, the Digital Millenimum Copyright Act has resulted in a situation where we still have a right to fair use of DVDs, including having backup copies, but the tools which allow us to make the copies are illegal. But I started finding ways to back up copy-protected software when I was a 13 year old with a Commodore 64, so I’m not about to stop now….Anyway, I picked the right time to buy a DVD burner, as the new dual-layer burners are on the market now. I got the Sony one. The dual-layer discs can hold as much data as commercially released DVDs, which means you can make direct copies, with no compression required. The only problem is, you can’t get the blank dual-layer discs yet (actually, you can, but only through Verbatim, and all they have is a 10 pack, in which only 1 of the 10 discs is a dual layer one). In the meantime, I’m using single-layer discs with DVD Shrink, which is without a doubt the most well-made freeware desktop application I’ve ever used.

Maria gave me an iPod for my birthday, but my hard drive crash happened soon after that, so I haven’t really had a chance to use it until recently. What a fabulous toy! The people at Apple are colonizing my mind. It’s a fundamentally different kind of music player than a tape or CD player, and at first I was worried there would be an intimidating learning curve (here’s an amsuing comparison of an iPod and a cassette). But I found it to be amazingly intuitive. Every time I wanted to do something with it, I’d take a guess at which button to push, and my guess was always right. It’s impressive how much functionality they’ve squeezed out of an interface that consists of a small screen, four buttons, and a dial. A while back my friend Jay sent me a bunch of CDs full of mp3’s, and I never found the time for the task of converting them to regular music CDs. Last night I downloaded them onto my iPod in no time, and so far I’m enjoying the new Convenant album (well, new to me anyway, it’s actually two years old).

Maria and I have started building a web site for the Decision ‘04 class she’ll be co-teaching this Fall. We’re using the Xoops content management system. One of the features we really wanted to use was the “Headlines” feature (an RSS newsfeed service, which you can use for things like embedding the current New York Times headlines directly into your site). But I discovered our hosting provider had disabled the PHP fopen function, which Xoops relies on for the newsfeed. They turned it off for good reason: it has a security hole big enough to drive an open mail relay through. I solved the problem by rewriting the Xoops newsfeeder to use cURL instead. There’s a discussion thread on this problem with the newsfeeder on the Xoops site, so I posted the fix there.

And the yard…A couple weeks ago I hired a crew to come through and remove all the trees and shrubs (save for a nice Japanese maple). I would’ve done it myself, but I don’t have a stump grinder, and they do. The previous owners of our house were an elderly couple, and they neglected the yard for probably 20 years. So the easiest solution was just to remove all the overgrown shrubs and half-dead trees. So now I’m removing all the weeds, defining the borders between the garden areas and the lawn, etc. Until now, I’ve deliberately avoided working in the yard much since we moved in, as I enjoy it more than working inside the house, and I was worried I’d end up neglecting important indoor projects (like re-wiring the electrical system). But I figure it’ll be ok to work on the yard for the rest of the summer, and then turn my attention indoors again in the Fall.

Benjamin Barber on Terrorism

When I was in graduate school in the mid-90s, I read a book called “Jihad vs. McWorld” by Benjamin Barber. This was not long after many pundits were trumpeting the “end of history,” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Barber was one of the people who saw that, with the lid of the Cold War blown off, terrorism would grow to be the next major threat to the Western world. He has a new book out now called “Fear’s Empire,” and he appeared last week on the PBS news show “Now.” In his appearance, he gave the most eloquent explanation of the underlying causes of terrorism that I’ve heard, and the clearest description of the differences between Kerry’s and Bush’s stances on terrorism that I’ve heard. What follows are excerpts from his interview with Bill Moyers. I shortened it as much as I could, but it’s still a bit long; cutting it any shorter wouldn’t do it justice. Please take a moment to read it. I’ve taken the liberty of correcting some obvious typos and mangled syntax (if you’re interested in the complete, original transcript, it’s here).

MOYERS: You talk in here about terrorism’s strategic jujitsu. What is that?

BARBER: By that I mean the premise of all terrorism is powerlessness. People who have power don’t use terror. It’s only people with no economic power, no political power, no pull, no influence who turn to terrorism because their only weapon is fear.

They use our power against us. They make us fearful. Think of what happened after 9/11. They brought down three, four airliners, did terrible initial damage. But, we closed down the air transportation system for three or four days. They sent a shock through the stock market. We closed down trading for four days.

They threatened us and got us once. We’ve been on a perpetual war footing ever since, constricting our liberties. Al Qaeda didn’t constrict American liberties. We did that to ourselves. The jujitsu they use is to use our fear to get us to do the things that they are powerless to do. So, that the first lesson in fighting terrorism is not to permit fear, and fear’s empire, to govern us in how we behave, how we take them on, and how we live out our lives.

…

MOYERS: …What do we on practical terms about these terrorists? About the threat of terrorism?

BARBER: Well, again, and the 9/11 Commission Report is very helpful. It says we’ve got to target the real dangers. The real danger is in the uninspected container ships that come in every day to ports around this country, 95 to 98 percent of which have no inspection whatsoever.

The real danger is in the cargo holds of our cargo planes where cargoes go out uninspected every day despite all the work being done on passenger planes. The real danger is in proliferating weapons that we ourselves sell around the world… We worried about Saddam Hussein giving the terrorists weapons. They don’t have to go there. They can go buy them. They can buy them on the Asian arms bazaars. So we can’t deal with the threat that way. We have to go after the conditions that create the threat, that sustain the threat, that finance the threat, and that provide the weapons for the threat. That’s what the 9/11 Commission book says so clearly.

…

MOYERS: The 9/11 Commission Report itself talks of a catastrophic threat from, quote, “Islamist terrorism.” I mean, those are dire words coming from an official commission of the United States government. What’s your take on that description?

BARBER: Well, I think they are looking at the cancerous tumor there. And rightly saying if we don’t deal with the cancerous tumor, it’s likely to kill us. But they also make very clear in the body of the report that there is a systematic undermining of the immune system of the world that is allowing the cancer to grow.

What we need to do in addition to taking out the tumors � which we have to do with military, intelligence and cooperation with our allies and even some of our adversaries � what we also have to do is deal with the defective, the defaulting immune system that has allowed these cancers to grow.

And the 9/11 Report says, Bill, very clearly that unless we deal not just with al-Qaeda and with terrorism and the radical sect Wahhabi Islam that gives them their ideology, but that we also deal with the millions and millions of young Muslim men around the world who are angry, who feel left out of the new world markets, who feel engaged in defensive ways by the aggressive American consumer mentality and materialist economy being pushed around the world that I called McWorld. Unless we deal with that, even if we excise the tumor of al-Qaeda, we will find new tumors growing on this same defective immune system.

MOYERS: But there is a school of thought which holds that al-Qaeda and the terrorists that everyone takes so seriously come not from conditions in the world but from a radical ideology embedded in Islam itself.

BARBER: But the problem with that argument is that it assumes that ideologies, whether it’s Communism or radical Islam, grow in isolation from the conditions around them. Communism became a radical and virulent and dangerous ideology. But it came out of three centuries of class warfare. It came out of the abuses and difficulties and contradictions of capitalism in the 18th and 19th century. That ideology in time grew into Bolshevism and all the terrible costs that we paid because of Bolshevism. And radical Wahhabi Islam is very much the same.

I mean, there’s a good way to define a radical religious movement. Radical religion is normal religion under siege. When people feel threatened in their normal religious beliefs, they become radical. So we have to do something about normal religion under siege if we’re going to deal with radical Islam.

MOYERS: But by your own admission this is an elusive and loose network of stateless killers who seem to thrive on anarchy and who are extremely difficult to locate and destroy. I mean, if they lure us into a permanent state of war and cause us to change the basic nature of our society in order to protect ourselves, haven’t they really won already?

BARBER: They have, indeed. And the theme of Fear’s Empire, in fact, is that as long as we fight the battle with terrorism on fear’s turf, as long as we invade countries that haven’t attacked us in the name of removing a possible supporter of terrorism, we cannot win the battle. Because even if we win, when we fight on fear’s turf, we lose. Because fear captures us.

And the problem in the United States has been that although we’ve been attacked once in that dreadful, terrible morning on September 11th, we have been in a kind of perpetual state of fear since then with the terror alert codes bumping up and down. With anonymous threats being translated by our Homeland Security Office saying somewhere a bridge, a school, a market may be attacked.

I just came from Boston [the Democratic National Convention] which looks more like the center of Iraq when you get near the Fleet Center because of the amount of security and tanks and guards and Coast Guard ships and overhead choppers flying around. You had to go through six layers of security to get in there. This is our nation’s great celebration of electoral democracy.

And you feel like you’re going into a maximum security prison when you go in there. That’s wrong. That’s fighting on their turf. And, as you say, we cannot win the battle against fear if we make fear our weapon. Let me just say one thing, when the president called the first wave of attacks on Iraq shock and awe, I imagined Osama bin Laden sitting somewhere in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan and saying, “Why didn’t I think of that? What a great term for what I wanted to do to the United States. Shock and awe them.” We will not shock and awe terrorism into submission. We have to create conditions in which the terrorists no longer will be motivated to do what they do.

…

MOYERS: Let’s come to the election. Given that both Kerry and Bush want to do the right thing for the country. Given that both are equally concerned I believe about the state of national security and making our country safe, is there really much wiggle room between them? Aren’t Kerry and the Democrats proposing to do more of the same of what Bush and his administration want to do?

BARBER: No, I don’t think that’s so. It’s certainly true as Bill Clinton said it Monday night at the convention that these are two good, honest men. Each of whom wants to protect America. I have no doubt of that.

The vilifications of George Bush as somehow unpatriotic or doing the wrong thing out of the wrong motives, I don’t buy. I don’t think it’s about oil. I think George Bush believes that he’s defending America. The problem is, he is mistaken in his means, and means are everything. It’s not enough… Kerry said it last night, it’s not enough to want to make the world safe. You have to know how to do it.

It’s not enough to want to declare war on terrorism. You have to know how to defeat terrorism. And the means question, how you do it, is absolutely essential. Do we send more American troops preemptively into still another country? There’s been noises about Iran, maybe there really are weapons of mass destruction in Iran. Maybe Iran really does have some ties to 9/11. Do we then take them on? What about North Korea? Do we go in there? Indonesia? They get the wrong government. Do we go in there? What if Pakistan defects? Pakistan… its population is very friendly to Wahhabi Islam. What if they get a government that makes them our enemy? Do we then invade Pakistan? Is that how we’re going to do it? War after preventive war, none of which works.

Or are we going to develop policies that allow us to create a world in which Pakistan and Iraq and Afghanistan and Indonesia and Sudan join the world of democracies? And in which terrorists become simply common criminals.

If we work with the world and we find ways to strengthen our ties to allies, follow the path of law, follow the path of international organizations, follow the new treaties that give us real strength, real teeth in dealing with terrorism and [having an] international criminal tribunal is the ideal instrument to deal with the prosecution of terrorists. If we do that…

MOYERS: But the United States doesn’t want to join that.

BARBER: Right. Not the United States. The Bush Administration doesn’t want to join it. But my point is, Bill, we’ve got to work with the world in order to survive. And if we do, our survival chances will go up. Yes, we will have to get used to living in a risky world. Most of the world’s population has always lived in that world. We, in a sense, are not entering a new age. We are entering the age the rest of the world’s been living in for a long time, but Americans were insulated from it by their good fortune, the bounty of the land and the walls that the oceans once represented.

MOYERS: Our new granddaughter is six months old now. Is this six month old child going to have to spend the rest of her life in this shadow of anxiety, fear and terror?

BARBER: I don’t think she has to live under the shadow of terrorism. Unless our own government is constantly telling her, “There may be a bomb in your school today honey, although we don’t know that, and we don’t know where the information’s coming from.” I think what she has to do is live in a world that’s interconnected, that’s interdependent. And where children who are outraged, or hungry, or feeling they have no future in Beirut, or in Kabul, will affect her safety and her future in the school she may be in, in Kentucky or in New York.

So, she’ll have to know that her growing up and flourishing will depend on others growing up and flourishing as well. But, I think that will probably make your daughter and my daughter and my granddaughter, and your granddaughter, far more aware of and willing to work with the world. It’s not time… George Bush said it back then. George Bush said, “The world better join us, it’s gotta be with us or against us.” It’s not time for the world to join America. It’s time for America to join the world.