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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.
-----
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.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 10:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 10:37 am (UTC)I see Banner's pals are starting to come over.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 07:54 pm (UTC)BTW, you can screach all you want, I'm thru responding to you. You do not have the mental capability to have a resoned debate, or even a half way decent argument.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 08:01 pm (UTC)If that's what you have to come up with to help convince you that your misguided assumptions are correct, more power to you. Is this the position you take whenever someone has the nerve to tell you you're wrong?
You're no different than the blind fool who covers his ears and crows, "LA LA LA LA! I AM NOT LISTENING TO YOU! I AM NOT LISTENING TO YOU!"
You don't even realize how bad you look.
Somehow I don't think I'm going to lose any sleep over you telling me I don't have the mental capacity to handle an argument, debate, or whatever else you want to come up with. From where I sit, you're the one who's looked the biggest fool of the lot here, and the fact you continue to deny it and spit in the wind while at the same time insulting people who for some reason consider you a friend amazes me.
You wouldn't understand reason if it walked up to you and busted you one in the face.
Keep living in your ignorance-filled world. It fits you perfectly.
A little more
Date: 2004-10-17 10:42 am (UTC)As for the rest of your blind rhetoric, it's typical BS. Bush knows about good vs. evil? Yeah, as far as he's concerned he's good and everyone else is evil.
Terrorism should be stopped, but destroying an entire religion is not the way to do it. Open your eyes, join the rest of us in the real world, and learn a little about Islam. It is NOT a violent religion. It's not supposed to be, and the fanatics are the ones trying to use it to further their hatred of Western civilization.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 11:01 am (UTC)If anything, you gamers out there should recognize a real live Paladin when you see one.
This does imply that you believe Bush channels the voice of God. Was that intentional? If it is, then there's not a lot of point in talking.
As to the rest: the best way to lose a war is to convince the opposition - and more importantly in this case, the potential talent base for that opposition - that you intend to destroy them utterly if you can.
The way you talk about it in this post would convince Arabic Muslem people that you want to kill all of them. At that point, they will fight you to the death. So your opposition goes from "thousands" to "tens of millions."
And that's why approach and ideas matter. That's the kind of fact you have to react to. It's not as clean and it's not as "pure," but it's a lot more effective in the long run.
There are plenty of people in the Arabic world who think this is a clash of civilisations. Adding to that number is stupid. It makes the fight harder. It's as if we'd started dropping rifles into German army bases during WWII. It's stupid.
I'll admit, emotionally, it's easier. But that's why rational civilisations have won, because they react to emperical data.
(Um. Is that where your commentary about "empire" comes from? Because nobody's brought that up. Emperical data means is data that is derived from observation or experiment; data which is verifiable or provable by these means. This is as opposed to faith, which exists in the absense or denial of data.)
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 11:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 12:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 02:31 pm (UTC)Kind of like what Bush likes to do, only the terrorists use religion in a much heavier way than Bush has tried so far.
Ummm... No!
Date: 2004-10-17 02:22 pm (UTC)Therefore the distinction that you are trying to make is asinine. Yes, of course they're against Bush, because he's too dangerously incompetent to be left in a role of serious leadership, because he has a HORRID environmental record, because he's done a miserable job managing the economy, because he makes important international decisions with 'his gut' and doesn't know the rest of the world from his own ass, because he panders to an ugly element of American society that is just as dangerous to Dara as the Taliban ever was. And for that matter, they're against the notion that Islam is the enemy, because just as there are Christians who aren't complete reactionaries (I can introduce you to some if you are in disbelief), there are Muslims who have gotten over the Crusades, achieved a degree of enlightenment, and actually have (or had, prior to certain foreign policy disasters) some degree kinship or admiration with the US.
Webb, who can't be bothered to keep a Livejournal
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 02:26 pm (UTC)I'd prefer
that the threads of hate
in Christianity
and in Islam
that would want Dara dead
died out
and reasonable people
in both faiths
were dominant
because
killing
and hating
was
never really
what either religion
was supposed
to be
about.
And it's sad
and funny
to me
that Christians turn to hate
'cause so has Islam
and Islam
turns to hate
'cause so Christians have done.
If you have any faith
I wonder
who you think
the architect of that
might be.
I don't believe
that there's a Devil.
So I'd go
myself
with "that evil
in people
that is farthest from Grace."
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 01:52 pm (UTC)> I just want it to be them and not us!
Bush does not own survival.
Bush does not own the fight against terror.
Bush does not own liberty.
Bush does not own life.
Bush does not own the manufacture of non-burka clothing.
Nobody wants the terrorists to win. Nobody wants to get slaughtered by extremists. That isn't an issue in today's election. If you think that people who are against Bush's policies want to see a nightmare terrorist-run world, you are living a life driven by slogans, poorly-considered ideas, and fear.
Rebecca
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 06:56 pm (UTC)My Dear, that is exactly what the issue is!
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 07:39 pm (UTC)That one?
no subject
Date: 2004-10-17 08:05 pm (UTC)"You shouldn't
"You shouldn't <do something, e.g. vote for Kerry>
because if you do, we'll all get tortured and die."
That's a slogan. That's the ultimate fearmongering slogan. That's what people in power use to convince people to STAY IN LOCKSTEP.
It's not okay to equate voting against Bush with voting for the terrorists.
Listen. Please. Who will get us all killed and mutilated and stuffed into burkas, who will hand victory to the terrorists, who is the man who will Protect Our Liberties---
That's not an election issue. That's an issue of fear.