Take a quick moment to reload John F Kennedy’s innagural address. The neo-conservatives (in today’s American political parlance seemingly meaning only “war-fans”) have always been quite fond of paragraph number four.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

I’m pondering paragraph number three these days, specifically the final sentence fragment, starting with the words “unwilling to witness of permit the slow undoing”.

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage— and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Do we fully believe Kennedy? That’s probably immaterial. Nonetheless, we can march back to the Bill of Rights and mark the sentence They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Rights such that they are — Enemy is Enemy — corect?, but the idea still is a meaninglessness of circumstances and one supposed Nazi is the same as one supposed al Qaeda, (Leave aside what you may with “the creator” and quibble with this supposed “watch-maker” proof of God …Why, someone needed to have created the watch, right?)

I’ll wait to see if the next time someone quotes Kennedy’s fourth paragraph, they can slide back and cover the important part of the third paragraph. I doubt it.

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