It would have been a great post. It would have asked how it is possible that the President of the United States, a year and a half after replacing one whose vice president held secret meetings with oil executives to plan and energy policy and who appointed oil company people to "regulate" them, whose party's view of an energy policy is to drill, baby, drill, whose members ridicule environmentalists regularly, who elected a Governor of the state most imperiled by this spill, believed that one of the "good things" about Katrina is that there was little oil spilled during its ramapage and has built a career on supporting increased drilling, be blamed for this horrible disaster in the Gulf.

It would have detailed the Republican hypocrisy, included a link to Jon Stewart's perfect description of the attack the President as being as bad as the President They elected (as if that were remotely possible) and would have even worked in some reference to the President's pitch perfect invitation to Regina Spektor to perform at the White House in celebration of Jewish Heritage Month.

Then I read Paul Rieckhoff's post.


And, of course, he is right. This is not a weekend for defending our President against his own claims that he is in charge of and can fix anything and everything, or that cleaning up the gulf is even his or the government's natural responsibility. It is to consider the men and women who fought and died for an idea---the United States of America and what that means to us and to the world.

Traveling through France many years ago, my wife was understanding (to a point) and my insistence that we stop, ever so briefly, at the United States-France military cemetery near Reims and Compeigne but it seemed to be the thing to do just as visiting Bunker Hill was as a child.

It's a terrible thing, of course, when a young person is sent to fight and is killed at war. The sacrifice is not only that of the soldier and his or her family but, almost certainly, that of the rest of us, since what dies on the battlefield is not just the person but what she or he might have accomplished. Buried in those cemeteries are dreams, of course, but cures to diseases and illnesses and advancements in the way we live that we cannot know.

And, sadly, these deaths have often been quite avoidable and, even more sadly, in a cause that was not worth the fight or that was plainly wrong.
But Memorial Day is not about that either.

It is about what those men and women were sent to defend. The people who pledged their lives, fortunes and "sacred Honor" did so to form a nation governed by the people themselves, not by a monarch and not for the benefit of anyone but the people at large.

It was not meant to support a government bought and paid for, beholden to its benefactors at the expense of the rest of us. As Professor Roosevelt has explained it:

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

The brave and clear platform adopted by this convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.

But the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them.

For more than three years we have fought for them...

The defeats and victories of these years have given to us as a people a new understanding of our government and of ourselves.

Yes, as Regina has said (in another, only slightly different context), that is why we fight.

It is Memorial Day. A day for us to think of the dead, but a day for them to speak to us as well. Those who have given their last measure of devotion should not be forgotten, but what they fought for cannot be forgotten either.