Rudy Hits A Homer
Sometimes a public speech changes the course of history.
Lincoln's address at the Gettysburg battlefield and Reagan's "
A Time For Choosing" address in 1964 are two examples.
And Rudy Guiliani's address to the Republican National Convention last night is also such a speech.
Rudy opened with the strongest possible argument for President Bush's reelection:
New York was the first capital of our great nation. It was here in 1789 in lower Manhattan that George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States.
It was here in 2001 in lower Manhattan that President George W. Bush stood amid the fallen towers of the World Trade Center and said to the barbaric terrorists who attacked us, "They will hear from us."
They have heard from us! They heard from us in Afghanistan and we removed the Taliban. They heard from us in Iraq and we ended Saddam Hussein's reign of terror.
They heard from us in Libya and without firing a shot Gadhafi abandoned weapons of mass destruction. They are hearing from us in nations that are now more reluctant to sponsor terrorists.
So long as George Bush is President, is there any doubt they will continue to hear from us until we defeat global terrorism.
We owe that much and more to those loved ones and heroes we lost on September 11th.
So why was this address to the convention so historic? Two reasons. First, Guiliani defined the war on terrorism with a passion and eloquence not heard since George W. Bush's
Whitehall Palace speech in London last November. And, second, by this speech Rudy Guiliani may have positioned himself as the frontrunner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.
Read a partial transcript of the Guiliani speech
here.
