Bush In My Back Yard

President Bush and his entourage made what is becoming his annual 4th of July pilgrimage to West Virginia yesterday:

It appears President George W. Bush now equates the Fourth of July with democracy, freedom and West Virginia.

Bush made his third Independence Day trip to the Mountain State Monday, addressing a large gathering outside outside West Virginia University’s Woodburn Hall in Morgantown. On July 4, 2002, Bush spoke in Ripley, W.Va., and last year he made his Independence Day speech in Charleston.
“Coming to West Virginia is becoming a Fourth of July tradition for me,” Bush told the crowd in Morgantown. “Every time I come here, I appreciate the beauty of West Virginia – and I appreciate being with decent, hardworking, patriotic Americans who call the Mountain State home.”

Bush spoke about freedom and democracy Monday, and he urged Americans to support those troops currently fighting to bring these values to the Middle East. He reiterated his oft-used quote, “We will bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies.”

“Our enemies in this new war are men who celebrate murder, incite suicide and thirst for absolute power,” Bush said. “They seek to spread their ideology of tyranny and oppression across the world. They seek to turn the Middle East into a haven for terror. They seek to drive America out of the region. These terrorists will not be stopped by negotiations, or concessions, or appeals to reason.

“In this war, there is only one option, and that is victory.”

The U.S. strategy in the Middle East can be summed up this way, Bush added. “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down, and then our troops can come home to a proud and grateful nation,” he said.

Bush told the crowd that many West Virginian soldiers were “serving with skill and honor in the war on terrorism.”

While the crowd was, for the most part (I am told), receptive, there was a vocal anti-war contingent:

The shouts of about 200 anti-war protestors a few blocks away could be heard faintly at times during Bush’s 20-minute speech.

It was his third Fourth of July visit to West Virginia in four years. He carried West Virginia in the 2000 and 2004 elections.

“George W. Bush may have entered the White House a Texan, but we have watched our president become a Mountaineer,” said U.S. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., who introduced Bush.

With huge American flags draped from campus buildings as a backdrop, the president spoke outdoors on a grassy plaza between several of WVU’s oldest lecture halls — dating to the 1870s — and near a mast from the USS West Virginia, which was sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at the onset of World War II.

Two hundred of anything attending anything other than a WVU football game is a decent number, but the crowd was, for the most part, pro-Bush. I did not make it, because I completely forgot to get a ticket to the event. Not to mention, I don’t fit into the two defined categories, that of Bush-supporter or Bush-hater. If they had a separate section for “Republicans who voted for Bush and support the war in Iraq but who are so pissed off by everything else this administration is doing they don’t want to be perceived as giving blanket support to the President” (John Cole, party of one), I might have gone.

Despite my inability to adhere to rule #1 of the ‘citizen journalist’ credo (‘Show up, moron’), I do have these pictures my friend took:

It appears that a good time was had by all.