Zell Miller retires, with some parting words for the Democratic Party: I tried to tell you. (Hat tip: Crumbling Ivory.)

And so while I retire with little hope for the near-term viability of the party I’ve spent my life building, I retire with a quiet satisfaction that after witnessing the struggle of democracy over communism and fascism, the fear I once held that America might not rise to meet this new challenge of terrorism has vanished like a fog under the radiance of a new dawn. While the threat is still real, the shadow looming across a promising future is gone.

And the credit for that goes to one man. Like the last lion of England, Winston Churchill, George W. Bush has stood alone and risked all to give the world a new, clearer path to the advancement of freedom.

Abraham Lincoln, in his second annual message to Congress, stated: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom for the free — honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth.”

George Bush has injected into a region of enslavement an incurable dose of freedom, and thus nobly saved that “last, best hope of earth” — free men.