For "each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth."

Those words were quoted by George W. Bush in his SOTU the other night. They are taken from Franklin D. Roosevelt's second inaugural address.

Who said that Bush & Co. doesn't understand Irony. For them, the Irony game is the same, it's just up on another level.

Kieran, over at Crooked Timber, makes the excellent suggestion that we read FDR's entire speech. It is edifying. Here's a passage:

In fact, in these last four years, we have made the exercise of all power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public's government. The legend that they were invincible-above and beyond the processes of a democracy-has been shattered. They have been challenged and beaten.

Our progress out of the depression is obvious. But that is not all that you and I mean by the new order of things. Our pledge was not merely to do a patchwork job with secondhand materials. By using the new materials of social justice we have undertaken to erect on the old foundations a more enduring structure for the better use of future generations.

In that purpose we have been helped by achievements of mind and spirit. Old truths have been relearned; untruths have been unlearned. We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays. We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.

This new understanding undermines the old admiration of worldly success as such. We are beginning to abandon our tolerance of the abuse of power by those who betray for profit the elementary decencies of life.

In this process evil things formerly accepted will not be so easily condoned. Hard-headedness will not so easily excuse hard-heartedness. We are moving toward an era of good feeling. But we realize that there can be no era of good feeling save among men of good will.

George W. Bush is assaulting FDR's New Deal achievements with a plan that "won't work." Let's not let him drain all meaning from FDR's words as well.