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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.
-----
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 09:54 am (UTC)But he's backing the amendment they want!
FMA is what they need to do these things. That's the tool they want. He's actively working to give it to them!
You're trying to impose a distinction that doesn't exist. He pushed for it! He's still pushing for it, though it's dropped a little off the radar because it wasn't working as well in the election campaign as they'd hoped it would. He's given speeches praising it.
Sure, he's not talking about using it that way. But so what? He's happy to and trying to give the people who do want to use it that way the tool to do those things.
Maybe he's not Stalin on this issue. He's just passing laws to give Stalin more power. You can't tell me that's not supporting.
And I'm deeply insulted that "not wanting a Constitutional amendment AGAINST ME" is "selfish" and at the comparison to a "brat" who has been "spoil[ed] rotten." Tell me, daddy, why is second-class status written into the Consitution good for me? Do I need to suffer more to be a good girl?
What are you thinking? God.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 10:12 am (UTC)This is not you being selfish. This is Bush trying to get legislation passed that makes gay couples less in the legal eyes of the country than straight ones.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 10:18 am (UTC)It's annoying that the people for the FMA have a better understanding of the Constitutional issues here than the people oppsing it. It's not just about marriage and it's not just about marriage and DPs.
Last year, the Supreme Court - over the objection of Bush's favourite justices, the one he wants to appoint more like - overturned the sodomy laws, by saying - essentially - that gayfolk are actual citizens too, and cannot be made illegal as a class. We are not "strangers to the law," if you want the legal term.
One of the many points of the FMA - the point I've been going on and on about - is that this puts us back into a separate class. A separate, and specifically unequal, class. It does so at the Constitutional level, so cannot be ruled unconstitutional.
It provides the Constitutional wedge necessary to reinstate Bowers vs. Hardwick. It provides a Consitutional toehold to return us to being strangers to the law.
I can't guarantee that it will be used to do that. I can guarantee that it will be tried, because the attempt is already being planned.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 10:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 10:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 10:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 12:36 pm (UTC)So what? I'm sure I could dig up plenty of reprehensible people who support positions YOU advocate. Would that make you wrong?
You already have seen my position on the whole marriage issue articulated in one of Banner's threads. Clearly you've forgotten it or else you wouldn't be so aghast at me. Your criticism is ill-applied.