He writes: “Not by nature a gifted public speaker, Bush did well for the most part, warming up himself and the crowd with a semi-ambitious domestic agenda (with, as a sop to the far right, a call for an end to ‘partial-birth abortions’), then changined to a more somber and urgent tone as he enumerated Saddam Hussein’s offenses against humanity.” I suppose we should take what we can get from the likes of Shales, but that’s just patently wrong. If it were just a concern for “the far right,” it would not have passed Congress twice.