The professor feels free to make free with the idea of freedom, suggesting that President Bush means one thing when he says another. But, in fact, there is no basis for such a claim. It merely reflects the professor’s own fuzziness about the idea of freedom, a fuzziness that results in splitting a concept, like an infinitive, that does not lend itself to being split.
Freedom may mean many things to many people, but in the context of Bush’s speech and actions it means the same thing overseas as it means here: freedom to choose your leaders, to speak your mind and to keep what you have. Just ask millions of new Iraqi voters. It’s what our Constitution guaranteed us in the nineteenth century and what it has not ceased to guarantee us, even in the twenty-first.
And that’s what the president spoke about sharing with the rest of the world in his Inaugural address, and reiterated in his State of the Union speech. Suggesting he had anything else in mind, absent the facts to demonstrate the charge, is just another case of the Left’s ongoing incoherence.