Check out this item from Daily Kos, referring to an editorial in the LA Times describing how Dubya's administration is "medieval."
The thing I find interesting is that this isn't the first time I've heard some of these things. Check out this paragraph from "Close-up: The Mind of George W. Bush," by Richard Brookhiser (From the April 2003 issue of The Atlantic):
Bush's faith makes "his sense of history very hard for secular intellectuals to understand," according to Gingrich. Given the care with which his associates discuss his beliefs, there must be a lot of secular intellectuals in the Bush Administration. "The great mystery in his decision-making," Frum says, "is the role of religion. When Bush says, 'I'll pray on this,' it's not a figure of speech." Mitchell Daniels believes that faith gives Bush "a certain serenity," as if he trusts that "history will take care of itself if he pursues the right policies." Daniels is "tempted," he says, to call the force that Bush sees guiding history "Providence," but he is reluctant to do so: "I wouldn't want anyone to over-read [the word]," he says. Bush's well-wishers--at least those who are not as aggressive as Gingrich--worry that if they speak bluntly about his faith, it will put people in mind of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Bush is not a culture warrior like many conservatives of that period, who thanked God for their enemies. But he is blunt, and specific, about his faith. "Providence" might strike him as too indefinite a word, smacking of the gentlemanly theological evasions of the Anglo-American Enlightenment (of John Locke, for instance).Practically, Bush's faith means that he does not tolerate, or even recognize, ambiguity: there is an all-knowing God who decrees certain behaviors, and leaders must obey. Such beliefs, however much they may alienate him from opinion-makers, are part of his bond with one other leader�the devout Anglican Tony Blair.
The LA Times piece puts this more succinctly:
Bush has a religious epistemology. Having devalued the idea of an observable, verifiable reality and having eschewed rational empiricism, he relies on his unalterable faith in himself not just to inform his policies, as all presidents have, but to dictate them.
Personally, I have no problem with anyone having strong religious faith, but the idea that the President would put his beliefs ahead of rational thought scares the hell out of me. What was that group a while back with the Nikes and the castration and the suicides to catch a ride on a comet? Those are the kinds of people who put faith ahead of rationality. While they might be a lot of fun at cocktail parties, people like that should really not be in charge of things like nuclear weapons.
Did I really just compare Dubya with a member of a religious cult? Hmm...I guess so.
Posted by Jason at October 6, 2003 09:41 AM