I spent half an hour on the radio with Hugh Hewitt earlier, sparring with Hugh over the inaugural address. Hugh considered it carefully reasoned whereas I—well, I posted my response earlier today. During the course of the program I came to the painful conclusion—Lord, is it painful—that Hugh was right and I was wrong.

What rang in my ears when I listened to the speech this morning—and what has been replayed on television and radio all day—were these lines:

“The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.”

That struck me as an overreach—really, a shocking overreach. When a president talks about “the survival of our liberty,” he’s using fighting language, and Bush seemed to be suggesting that the mere existence of a tyranny or autocracy might henceforth be understood by the United States as a casus belli. No rest for Americans until we’ve democratized the entire world? Ridiculous.

What happened on the radio was that my dear old friend Hugh caused me to print out the full text of the speech, then directed me to this paragraph, which, I confess, had simply made no impression on me when I listened to Bush this morning:

“This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary. Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities.”

Well then.

I still think I had a point. Certain lines or passages in any speech are likely to carry more weight than others, and when they were working on this address Michael Gerson, John McConnell, Bill McGurn and the other fellers in the White House speechwriting shop surely knew that the passage about “the survival of our liberty” would make headlines whereas the passage that “this is not primarily the task of arms” would not.

But all the same, they did indeed include that second passage, which takes such pains to qualify the first. Which means—and as I’ve said, this is painful—that Hugh was right.

But if Hugh was right—since this seems to be a day for picking fights with friends—then Victor Davis Hanson was wrong. “This is the first time,” Victor writes elsewhere on this site, “that an American president has committed the United States to side with democratic reformers worldwide.” But Bush’s statement—that we’re on the side of democracy around the world short of the use of arms—has in one form or another been made by lots of presidents, including, for example, the Gipper and JFK. We are the friends of liberty everywhere, they all said in one way or another, but the custodians only of our own.

Victor?