I’m still pondering the content, though I’m generally a three-cheers for liberty kind of guy. But I do think Bush was surprisingly flat in his delivery. I think he was going for somber and sailed just a bit further past that to sedated. I do think that whatever its merits or demerits, this speech will end up being passed around in places like Iran like Samizdat for years to come. In that sense, I think it was a brilliant bit of foreign policy masked as domestic rhetoric. How can a dissident in Iran or Burma read such a thing and not feel emboldened?

In fact, I wish someone would wrap a dead fish with it and drop it off at the Saudi embassy.