CREDIBILITY? COMPETENCE? CHARACTER? Yes, the
incredible shrinking _resident fails on all three
counts...But clearly it is even worse than that...How
long will the leadership of the Republican Party front
for this belligerent, troubled man and his cabal?
Robert Dreyfuss, www.tompaine.com: Yesterday in The Washington Post and on 60 Minutes, Bob Woodward presented a terrifying picture of a president obsessed. Bush demonized Saddam, creating a Manichean
world in which America was a God-inspired nation
combating the Beelzebub-led hell of Iraq. It's not
clear whether Bush believed—like LaHaye—in the
necessity of a climactic struggle with Satan's legions
from Babylon, but the president's crusade had all the
same fervor...Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any
advice? "I asked the president about this. And
President Bush said, 'Well no,' and then he got
defensive about it," says Woodward. "And then he said
something that really struck me. He said of his
father, 'He is the wrong father to appeal to for
advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in
terms of strength.' And then he said, 'There's a
higher father that I appeal to.'"
Perhaps Bush believes that he has a pipeline to God,
that he can ask God for advice about which wars to
launch. By all accounts, however, his real father—the
earthly one, not the imaginary one in the sky—was
against the war. Or, perhaps Bush mixed up God and
Dick Cheney.
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http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10267
God Made Me Do It
Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in
Alexandria, Virginia, who specializes in politics and
national security issues. He is currently working on a
book about America's policy toward political Islam
over the past 30 years.
Is Dick Cheney God? If you read the Gospel According
to Woodward, it's clear that the president seems to
think so.
A few months ago, I wrote a profile of the Rev. Tim
LaHaye for Rolling Stone. LaHaye is the author of Left
Behind, the best-selling series of books on the End of
the World, a hyped-up version of alleged Biblical
prophecies that predict that Jesus Christ will return
to earth after a climactic battle between God and
Satan at Armageddon. Satan, of course, happens to set
up his headquarters in Babylon, just south of where
Baghdad is today. LaHaye is a highly influential
organizer of the Christian right—he founded the Moral
Majority and the secretive Council on National
Policy—and he helped elect Bush by swinging skeptical
Christian-right leaders behind him in 2000. LaHaye and
his fundamentalist flock often equated Saddam with the
Antichrist—literally, not figuratively. In Rolling
Stone, I speculated that LaHaye's weird beliefs might
have influenced the president, a born-again Christian
whose decision to go war in Iraq seems to have been
directed as much at Satan as against Saddam.
Maybe I was right.
Yesterday in The Washington Post and on 60 Minutes,
Bob Woodward presented a terrifying picture of a
president obsessed. Bush demonized Saddam, creating a
Manichean world in which America was a God-inspired
nation combating the Beelzebub-led hell of Iraq. It's
not clear whether Bush believed—like LaHaye—in the
necessity of a climactic struggle with Satan's legions
from Babylon, but the president's crusade had all the
same fervor.
Apparently he talked to the wrong father. Reports
Woodward and 60 Minutes:
Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? "I asked
the president about this. And President Bush said,
'Well no,' and then he got defensive about it," says
Woodward. "And then he said something that really
struck me. He said of his father, 'He is the wrong
father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go
to, to appeal to in terms of strength.' And then he
said, 'There's a higher father that I appeal to.'"
Perhaps Bush believes that he has a pipeline to God,
that he can ask God for advice about which wars to
launch. By all accounts, however, his real father—the
earthly one, not the imaginary one in the sky—was
against the war. Or, perhaps Bush mixed up God and
Dick Cheney. Woodward makes it startlingly clear that
Cheney was the driving force behind the Iraq
misadventure. But for Bush, war in Iraq wasn't
Cheney's will, it was God's:
Going into this period, I was praying for strength to
do the Lord's will. I'm surely not going to justify
the war based on God. . . Nevertheless, in my case I
pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as
possible. And then of course I pray for personal
strength and forgiveness.
Says Woodward, succinctly, of Bush: "He's not an
intellectual." He's not. But Woodward makes clear that
Bush is perfectly capable of disguising his godly work
from people who disagree, such as Colin Powell, who
wasn't told of the decision to go to war even after
war planning was well underway:
And there's this low boil on Iraq until the day before
Thanksgiving, Nov. 21, 2001. This is 72 days after
9/11. This is part of this secret history. President
Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes
Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically, and takes
him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door
and says, "What have you got in terms of plans for
Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you
to get on it. I want you to keep it secret."
There's lots more in the book. It ought to be required
reading for anyone planning to cast a vote in
November. With at least 11 more Americans killed this
weekend, with well over a thousand Iraqis killed since
April 1, with U.S. troops poised for massive assaults
on Najaf and Fallujah, with Iraq's Governing Clowncil
crumbling fast, with civil war looming in Iraq,, and
with the growing possibility that the crisis in Iraq
could spill over into Iran and Syria, too, Americans
are asking: How did we stuck in this mess? Woodward
has answered that question better than anyone else so
far.
Published: Apr 19 2004