BlogWood: MT Archives

W's fundamental flaws

Remember when the word “crusade” was being bandied about by W’s administration? That was pre-Afghanistan, and they quickly thought better of being so transparent, but the underlying philosophy has not changed: W and his band of fundamentalists are on a religious crusade, and, being the chosen ones, they really don’t mind if their misadventures result in a real life armageddon-like violent world conflict.

LA Times:

Ask Bush family members and friends about the intersection between the war on terrorism and George W. Bush's Christian faith and you get some strong answers.

"George sees this as a religious war," one family member told us. "He doesn't have a PC view of this war. His view is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know."

Family friend Franklin Graham told us: "The president is not stupid. The people who attacked this country did it in the name of their religion. He's made it clear that we are not at war with Islam. But he understands the implications of what is going on and the spiritual dimensions."

Critics charge that the president is blindly engaged in a crusade, propelled by a belief in Armageddon that will end in a geopolitical disaster. One has compared his faith to the fundamentalists of Islam. Another calls it downright "frightening." Do we have something to fear from Bush's obviously strongly held convictions?

Keep in mid that this article was written by the authors of a pro-Bush book that is being released. They see his strong faith as a good thing and think you should too:

Even those who don't share Bush's religious convictions should see them as a good thing. His faith compels him to wrestle with ethical questions that less religious men might simply ignore. And his strong faith offers us visible guideposts by which we can evaluate his performance as president. Find me a commander in chief who lacks core convictions rooted in something greater than himself, and you'll have a leader who lacks an identifiable moral compass and will, accordingly, be prone to drift off course.

Part of Bush's self-confident resolve perhaps comes from his habit of reading Psalm 55 on the anniversary of 9/11. "My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death assail me…. Destructive forces are at work in the city; threats and lies never leave its streets…. Let death take my enemies by surprise; let them go down alive to the grave; for evil finds lodging among them…. Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you; He will never let the righteous fall. But you, O God, will bring down the wicked into the pit of corruption; bloodthirsty and deceitful men will not live out half their days. But as for me, I trust in you."

It is easier to think of the war on terrorism as a struggle over politics or oil. But the reality is that, fundamentally, it is about core beliefs. Just like the arms race was a symptom, and not the cause, of the Cold War, terrorism is a grisly byproduct of virulent Islam's difficulty in coping with a set of Western beliefs. For Bush, those beliefs have both strengthened and tempered his instincts.

That’s right: if those swarthy heathens would just let us convert them to our true religion, everything would be right with God’s world.