Sunday, October 17, 2004

Excuse me, Mr. President -- its God calling on line 2

Ron Suskind's NYT Magazine piece about Bush Without a Doubt begins with a discussion with a Republican domestic policy advisor named Bruce Bartlett. Bartlett says ''Just in the past few months, I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do . . . This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts. He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence. But you can't run the world on faith.''
The Suskind spends the rest of the article proving to a disbelieving political world that yes, Bush really does believe he is on a mission from God, and yes, so do his followers.
Its a lengthy article because people need a lot of convincing. This is a form of meglomaina that western democracies have never seen before -- even the great egotists like Nixon, DeGaulle, Churchill and Trudeau never actually thought of themselves as divinely ordained, at least not all of the time. In western culture, the only people we've seen before who went on a stated Mission from God were the Blues Brothers. Like Elwood and Jake, nothing will stop Bush from doing what he thinks God wants him to do. Luckily, God only wanted Jake and Elwood to put on a concert. God apparently wants Bush to transform the United States into a republican's vision of paradise - endless wars against the infidels, no abortions, and making sure the rich get richer. Lord, hear my prayer!

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