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solarbirdI'm posting this because it's much too much like what I've been picking up as how the Bush administration - and how President Bush in particular - works.
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Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
October 17, 2004
TinyURL here: http://tinyurl.com/5nb83
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''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.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them...
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''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.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''
Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''
Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''
Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''
The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to make sense of the same thing -- a president who has been an extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity and action.
But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect.
The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic ''base'' that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ''you can be certain and be wrong.''
What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?
All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and religiosity -connects to a single word, ''faith,'' and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ''In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!'' (Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election effort in New Jersey.)
Much, much more at the web site.
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In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
October 17, 2004
TinyURL here: http://tinyurl.com/5nb83
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''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.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them...
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''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.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''
Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''
Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''
Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''
The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to make sense of the same thing -- a president who has been an extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity and action.
But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect.
The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic ''base'' that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ''you can be certain and be wrong.''
What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?
All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and religiosity -connects to a single word, ''faith,'' and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ''In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!'' (Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election effort in New Jersey.)
Much, much more at the web site.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 12:32 am (UTC)Please explain what the other problems are.
Our rights are no more compromised than they were in the past. Neither party has a good record in restraining the bureaucratic desire to create new rules.
For all the things Bush is against he has been pretty poor at getting them passed. A constitutional amendment has got to be the slowest possible way to get a law passed.
Kerry is a pacifist at best, he will try to find out why the terrorist want to behead people, and reach a understanding. That is lunacy.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 12:43 am (UTC)Someone not being very good at what they're trying to do doesn't change the quality of the attempted deed itself.
And he's been very successful at the most important element of that amendment passage attempt: rallying his fundamentalist base. Don't get me - or them - wrong. They want that amendment. They want it because they need to insert a wedge between us and equal protection, and they need to do it at the Constitutional level. (This isn't my speculation; I heard that at the anti-marriage rally in Safeco field last summer, too.) It's not just about marriage and domestic partnerships; it's about whether we're full citizens.
Or as one of the speakers at Safeco put it, "Without this amendment, we have no way to discriminate against them." Without it, abominations like this past summer's Virginia laws - limiting the contract rights of queers at the most basic level - won't get upheld in court. But with it... they might. The toehold will be there.
Anyway.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:23 am (UTC)Any more than Jeffrey Dahmer could be said to speak for Gays.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:33 am (UTC)If President Bush were not seeking out their support for their reasons, it might be different. But he is, so it does.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:58 am (UTC)The facts on the ground are that the administration is actively seeking the support of these groups and is doing so by pushing the agenda they want. I don't see how this is controversial. As of the week before the third debate, Bush's stump speech still included the need for the FMA. The Bush adminsitration has also made every attempt it can at the administrative level to remove protections from GLBT Federal employees and has issued administrative orders above and beyond DOMA against recognising same-gender marriages to any degree at any level, even when legal, US or foreign.
The man does not like fags, okay? Sorry if that makes you uncomfortable. Deal with it.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 02:26 am (UTC)One would think that perhaps it's a good sign that there are people out there whose position is more extreme than the administration's. Now, Bush can't be responsible for the fact that some of his supporters take a position that is even more to the right than his own. It seems really untenable to me that you're attacking him based on the rantings of a private citizen who might lend him support.
Why would I be uncomfortable? I'm not a fag. :-)
But I would have to say that just because someone does not cater to every single desire of a minority group, regardless of the effect it might have on anyone else, it does not construe as "hate". Any more than a parent who doesn't spoil his brat rotten hates his child.
I really am going to have to write this "The Politics of Selfishness" essay I've been Mulling over. I haven't because there's no Gallery to publish it in any more.
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Date: 2004-10-17 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 09:48 am (UTC)Right, but he's clearly lying about that. It's not part of his stump speech. If asked to comment on it, he will.
But when it comes to queers, it's part of his campaign. It's part of the campaigns of dozens of Republicans across the country - particularly twelve of those who are running against Democrats who voted against the FMA.
This is a multi-year effort that's being built. President Bush does not like me. As I told Mauser, his administration has reversed protections against queers or moved to reduce the rights of queers whereever it could get away with it, particularly in-house.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 12:43 am (UTC)And in the process, he's alienating the USA from the rest of the world because of his reckless cowboy antics. He's also using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to continue fear-mongering tactics geared to keep him in power. The trick is making the public fear another attack so much and to paint himself as the only guy who can protect them that people will HAVE to vote him back into office. Hell, Cheney as good as said it when he said putting Kerry in the White House would invite further attacks on us.
What about the violent crimes our own citizens commit? You do realize you're more likely to die as a result of a fellow American attacking you than you are from a foreign terrorist, I hope.
Bush is trying to get everyone to believe differently.
Please explain what the other problems are.
Our rights are no more compromised than they were in the past. Neither party has a good record in restraining the bureaucratic desire to create new rules.
I've already listed a few, and if you think Bush wouldn't appoint new Supreme Court justices that fall in line with his Godly, conservative views, you're in need of a wake-up call. That will be part of his legacy if he is re-elected, because there will be new appointees during this next Presidential term. We could very well say goodbye to a woman's right to abortion, and that's just the start.
For all the things Bush is against he has been pretty poor at getting them passed. A constitutional amendment has got to be the slowest possible way to get a law passed.
If you're talking about the gay marriage issue, that seems to have been a smokescreen to distract people from ongoing problems in Iraq. That whole war has turned out to be a farce, and the only good thing about it has been the removal of Saddam Hussein. However, the events that led to it have been shown to be dishonest in nature. Lies. Deception.
Kerry is a pacifist at best, he will try to find out why the terrorist want to behead people, and reach a understanding. That is lunacy.
That's just bullshit.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 12:47 am (UTC)But it doesn't. For years I thought that was what liberals wanted throughout the world. Now we find that for these it is not.
No, I can't understand it either.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 12:51 am (UTC)Of course!
You'd think that the liberation of an oppressed people would make them happy.
It would.
That the freeing and granting of equal rights to millions of women would make them happy.
It would.
That the ending ot slavery and torture would make them happy.
It would.
That the promotion of equal and civil rights would make them happy.
It would.
But - and pay attention here - NOT AT THE COST OF OUR OWN SAFETY AND STANDING IN THE WORLD. This is the part you and the rest of the right-wingers continually fail to grasp. In the midst of your gung-ho, let's go make the world a better place for everyone else, you fail to see that the WAY Bush chooses to go about it jeopardizes OUR OWN SAFETY.
Please, quit while you're behind. You're embarrassing.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:06 am (UTC)Our standing in the world? I'm an American, I don't really care what the rest of the world thinks about us, as long as they're not attacking us. Trying to please the rest of the world is foolish, worrying about their opinion of you is equally so.
Tell me, do YOU worry about other people's opinons of you? Makes me wonder just what kind of life you live.
And the way Bush is going about it is enhacing our safety, not jeopardizing it. If you don't meet force with force, and kick the living shit out of it, you lose. Try studying some history. WWII wasn't won by playing nice. It was won by kicking ass, killing people, and breaking things.
I'm not behind, you're just an unbelievable moron.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:10 am (UTC)Newsflash - part of the reason they want to attack us is because of what they think about us. This is as much a result of propaganda fed to people who don't have the resources to find out the truth as it is because of how we throw our weight around.
Maybe someday you'll learn that might does not make right, and it's not okay for us to go around imposing our will on others just because we can.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:17 am (UTC)And wrong, might does make right, always has, always will. Read some history.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:23 am (UTC)Apparently not, if we're still worried about being attacked again.
And wrong, might does make right, always has, always will. Read some history.
In Spider-Man, the famous line is "With great power comes great responsibility." I'm still waiting for Bush to figure that out.
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Date: 2004-10-17 01:13 am (UTC)And I'm very happy that Saddam is gone. I'm just not yet seeing how you don't end up with another dictator, particularly given the current paths. It will be ... difficult. It's a bad situation.
Oh, and briefly: assumptions of bad motives rarely help a discussion. It poisons discourse.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:24 am (UTC)Myself, I never liked what went on there, but I saw no need for -us- to do anything about it, especially as ex-military. I know the people who have to die to go in to those places and free them if we do it.
When we were attacked however I agreed that it was worth doing. I wished that I wasn't too old to go back into active service, and would have if I could have.
I think if Bush remains President, then we have the credibility to tell everyone over there to 'play nice or else'. Even if we do pull out in a few years. Because everyone will believe that Bush will back up those threats with force. Kerry is just not believable. I very much want those people to remain free, we got them this far, it's up to us to see it through now. Put our money where our mouth is so to speak.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 02:48 am (UTC)Really, then why are North Korea and Iran both very public about their desire to develop nuclear weapons? Because they know that militarily Bush has stretched us to the breaking point. They know that politically Bush has isolated us from our historical allies. They know that Bush's lies and exaggerations have put us in a position where no one will believe us when we claim to have intelligence about WMD in the future.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 12:48 am (UTC)Further, I'm sure Bush knew it would get shot down when it came up for vote. But the Republicans already made it clear that they were determined to politicize the issue and would continue fighting to get it passed.
So, yeah - equal rights for all unless you're gay, I guess.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:44 am (UTC)Not from a lack of trying. Aside from the de facto creation of a national ID and the numerous downgradings of rights to privacy, there's the whole "American citizen on American soil held as enemy combatant" thing going on. That's still in the courts and I think the administration will lose, but that's still a terrifying precident to try to set.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 02:11 am (UTC)Stop making sense. :-)
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 02:31 am (UTC)He volunteered to go to war. He personally killed people. What kind of pacifist is that?
I think you’re not actually thinking about Kerry. Instead, you’re carrying around a caricature of Kerry in your head, and reacting to that. Do some research, find out about the real man and his history.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 02:34 am (UTC)I'm still waiting to see something out of Banner that even approaches reality.
I guess he and Bush have something in common after all. Both of them are out of touch with what's really going on.