Back in 2003-4, I had numerous email conversations that went on for days with some of my readers about the expected cost of the war. Somehow, they believed the Administration's lowball estimates, claiming that the $200 billion figure cited by White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was way over the top, that it was the result of "double counting" and a whole lot of other nonsense.

I, for one, never bought that. I thought $200 billion and several years was itself extremely lowball...and so far, I've been right.

Not that any of the aforementioned readers have had the decency to admit it.

This war isn't going away any time soon. Not even if the Congress votes to de-fund it. The Saudis have said recently and publicly that our occupation of Iraq is illegal and unjustified, but I think that's just a requisite CYA for domestic assuagement. They know better than anyone that if the U.S. military wasn't in Iraq right now quelling the Shi'ites, that Saudi forces would have to step into the breach--which they no-how want to do. They need us there to fight a proxy war for them.

Especially now that a recent Woods-Mackenzie study has reviewed Iraq's oil reserves and concluded that they were much larger than previously thought--second only to Saudi Arabia's--there's no way we can leave Iraq. Not now, and probably not ever.

So what does this do for the accounting on the War on Terror War for Energy?

I'm now raising my estimate: Half a trillion is still lowballing it. Big time.

The U.S. military has spent an average of $44 billion a year to protect oil operations in the Persian Gulf, and they've been doing that for years. Here's a sneak preview from a new article I just finished, which will go out later this week:

We import about 800 million barrels per year of black gold from the Persian Gulf. Divided into $44 billion, that works out to slightly less than $55 a barrel. When oil is trading on the open market around $65!

If those protection costs weren’t externalized onto the U.S. military (your tax dollars at work!) but priced into the world market, I reckon that would put oil at around $120 a barrel.

Does anybody still think renewable energy is too expensive compared to oil?

This administration has lied pretty much every time it has opened its mouth about the Iraq war. From the missing WMDs to the purported connections between Saddam and al Qaeda; from the alleged attempt to purchase Nigerian yellowcake to the outing of Valerie Plame; from the assertion that Iraq could fund its own reconstruction to the firing of the guy who provided the (lowball) $200 billion estimate; from the promise that we would be greeted as liberators, to the denial that Iraq has descended into a civil war that we cannot win; from the completely fabricated stories about Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, to the persistent under-reporting of casualties, woundings and long-term illnesses suffered by soldiers; from the "they hate us because we're free" pabulum to the secretive attempt to privatize Iraq's oil wealth and put it into the hands of U.S. oil companies...it has been one, big, fat, cynical, outrageous, and unforgiveable lie.

And speaking of shamless liars, check out the latest bit of "revisionist history" visited upon us by none other than Mr. "Global Warming is a Hoax" himself:

"The whole idea of weapons of mass destruction was never the issue, yet they keep trying to bring this up."
-- Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), 4/27/07, criticizing Congress and the media for "mischaracterizing" the reasons for U.S. involvement in Iraq

VERSUS

"Our intelligence system has said that we know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction -- I believe including nuclear."
-- Inhofe, 8/18/02

Ugh. I mean...??? How dumb (or forgetful) do these guys think we are?

When I think about how that half a trillion plus has been and will be spent, with hardly any serious debate on the alternatives...and then think about how far half a trillion would take us in developing renewables and weaning ourselves off of foreign oil...I just shake my head. It just seems too brain-dead to be true. Is there nobody driving this bus?

But that discussion is for another time...

Until then,
--C ]]> Folks,

I have been meaning to revisit the cost of the Iraq war for some time, but this snippet from yesterday’s Progress Report did a suitable job of it, so I’m just pasting it here.

Back in 2003-4, I had numerous email conversations that went on for days with some of my readers about the expected cost of the war. Somehow, they believed the Administration’s lowball estimates, claiming that the $200 billion figure cited by White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was way over the top, that it was the result of “double counting” and a whole lot of other nonsense.

I, for one, never bought that. I thought $200 billion and several years was itself extremely lowball…and so far, I’ve been right.

Not that any of the aforementioned readers have had the decency to admit it.

This war isn’t going away any time soon. Not even if the Congress votes to de-fund it. The Saudis have said recently and publicly that our occupation of Iraq is illegal and unjustified, but I think that’s just a requisite CYA for domestic assuagement. They know better than anyone that if the U.S. military wasn’t in Iraq right now quelling the Shi’ites, that Saudi forces would have to step into the breach–which they no-how want to do. They need us there to fight a proxy war for them.

Especially now that a recent Woods-Mackenzie study has reviewed Iraq’s oil reserves and concluded that they were much larger than previously thought–second only to Saudi Arabia’s–there’s no way we can leave Iraq. Not now, and probably not ever.

So what does this do for the accounting on the War on Terror War for Energy?

I’m now raising my estimate: Half a trillion is still lowballing it. Big time.

The U.S. military has spent an average of $44 billion a year to protect oil operations in the Persian Gulf, and they’ve been doing that for years. Here’s a sneak preview from a new article I just finished, which will go out later this week:

We import about 800 million barrels per year of black gold from the Persian Gulf. Divided into $44 billion, that works out to slightly less than $55 a barrel. When oil is trading on the open market around $65!

If those protection costs weren’t externalized onto the U.S. military (your tax dollars at work!) but priced into the world market, I reckon that would put oil at around $120 a barrel.

Does anybody still think renewable energy is too expensive compared to oil?

This administration has lied pretty much every time it has opened its mouth about the Iraq war. From the missing WMDs to the purported connections between Saddam and al Qaeda; from the alleged attempt to purchase Nigerian yellowcake to the outing of Valerie Plame; from the assertion that Iraq could fund its own reconstruction to the firing of the guy who provided the (lowball) $200 billion estimate; from the promise that we would be greeted as liberators, to the denial that Iraq has descended into a civil war that we cannot win; from the completely fabricated stories about Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, to the persistent under-reporting of casualties, woundings and long-term illnesses suffered by soldiers; from the “they hate us because we’re free” pabulum to the secretive attempt to privatize Iraq’s oil wealth and put it into the hands of U.S. oil companies…it has been one, big, fat, cynical, outrageous, and unforgiveable lie.

And speaking of shamless liars, check out the latest bit of “revisionist history” visited upon us by none other than Mr. “Global Warming is a Hoax” himself:

“The whole idea of weapons of mass destruction was never the issue, yet they keep trying to bring this up.”

– Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), 4/27/07, criticizing Congress and the media for “mischaracterizing” the reasons for U.S. involvement in Iraq

VERSUS

“Our intelligence system has said that we know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction — I believe including nuclear.”

– Inhofe, 8/18/02

Ugh. I mean…??? How dumb (or forgetful) do these guys think we are?

When I think about how that half a trillion plus has been and will be spent, with hardly any serious debate on the alternatives…and then think about how far half a trillion would take us in developing renewables and weaning ourselves off of foreign oil…I just shake my head. It just seems too brain-dead to be true. Is there nobody driving this bus?

But that discussion is for another time…

Until then,

–C

IRAQ — SUSTAINED WAR WILL LEAD TO ‘FEWER JOBS AND SLOWER ECONOMIC
GROWTH’: According to the Congressional
Research Service, the vetoed
$124 billion Iraq supplemental and the President’s new “request for $116
billion” to fund the war in the next fiscal year will “push
the total for Iraq to $564 billion.” That amount is “about ten
times more than the Bush administration anticipated before the war started
four years ago, and no one can predict how high the tab will go.” Before the
war, the White House estimated the “conflict would cost about $50 billion” and
“White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey lost
his job after he offered a $200 billion estimate.” Robert Hormats, author of
The Price of Liberty, worries that the Bush administration’s “painless” approach
to war funding in which the “average American” feels “no economic consequence”
will hamper our nation’s ability to address domestic concerns like Social
Security and Medicare. A new
report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that Hormats’s
concerns are legitimate and that sustained expenses of the war in Iraq will
likely lead “to fewer
jobs and slower economic growth.” The study shows that while some short-term
benefits to increased military spending are likely, the long-term strains on the
economy produces “considerably
higher” inflation and interest rates, reduces the number of available jobs,
and “diverts
resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment.” As
Hormats said of the war time economy, “You
can’t have business as usual.” ]]> http://www.getreallist.com/war-costs-update.html/feed 1 http://www.getreallist.com/the-osp-unmasked.html http://www.getreallist.com/the-osp-unmasked.html#comments Sat, 10 Feb 2007 01:55:00 +0000 http://biz40.inmotionhosting.com/~getrea6/?p=597 I have been greatly relieved to see some of the truth about the Office of Special Plans coming out into the open...finally. I first blogged it in June 2003, quoting an article from Newsweek, so we've known about it for nearly four years. I have blogged it seven times since then.

OK, so this investigation is about four years too late to save us from getting into the Iraq debacle, but at least the truth is coming to light. Now that the White House's deceptions about the war are becoming public knowledge--no longer something that can be cast aside as "conspiracy theory"--perhaps we can also have a real debate about Iraq. Again, yes, a debate we should have had before the war--and would have had, had the Republicans dominating all three branches of government not stonewalled it, but better late than never, I guess.

I am reminded again of one of my favorite quotes by the Dr. Martin Luther King: "The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

--C]]> Folks,

I have been greatly relieved to see some of the truth about the Office of Special Plans coming out into the open…finally. I first blogged it in June 2003, quoting an article from Newsweek, so we’ve known about it for nearly four years. I have blogged it seven times since then.

OK, so this investigation is about four years too late to save us from getting into the Iraq debacle, but at least the truth is coming to light. Now that the White House’s deceptions about the war are becoming public knowledge–no longer something that can be cast aside as “conspiracy theory”–perhaps we can also have a real debate about Iraq. Again, yes, a debate we should have had before the war–and would have had, had the Republicans dominating all three branches of government not stonewalled it, but better late than never, I guess.

I am reminded again of one of my favorite quotes by the Dr. Martin Luther King: “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

–C

Feith Takes the Fall

By Mark Thompson/Washington

Friday, Feb. 09, 2007

For a person most Americans have never heard of, Doug Feith has been called terrible names by very important people. In Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward quotes General Tommy Franks — appalled at the quality of intelligence about Iraq — railing that Feith, then the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, was “the f—king stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” Today, there was another bad review. Feith got publicly slapped by the Defense Department’s inspector general for developing pro-war intelligence on Iraq — outside of official channels — that now seems plainly wrong. The IG concludes that Feith’s office, on a free-lance basis, made claims “that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community.” The report said that Feith’s shop exaggerated the purported links between Saddam Hussein’s government and al Qaeda. “That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the armed services committee. He said the Feith’s work, “which was wrong, which was distorted, which was inappropriate … is something which is highly disturbing.”

Feith may have been one of the Bush Administration’s most fervent supporters of war with Iraq but, in truth, he was only a bit player. Indeed, he is the third bit player in the Iraq fiasco to be paying for the sins of his superiors recently. For a couple of weeks now, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been in the dock in federal court in Washington, trying desperately to keep his one-time boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, from being stained by the responsibility for Libby’s chats with reporters and government officials about Valerie Plame’s CIA job. Then, just yesterday, Army General George Casey was raked over the coals by Senators who didn’t think his past 30 months in command of U.S. ground forces in Iraq warrants his elevation to Army chief of staff. While he did get the promotion, the Senate vote of 83-to-14 was the poorest showing for an Army chief since Vietnam. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Casey should be held accountable for giving Congress too-rosy assessments of the war as the situation there spiraled downward into chaos. “I have questioned in the past and question today a number of decisions and judgments that Gen. Casey has made in the past two and a half years,” McCain said. “During that time, conditions in Iraq have gotten remarkably and progressively worse.”

This trio of woes seems to have a common thread: Underlings snared while trying to please their bosses. It’s almost like blaming the hammer instead of the carpenter for a bent nail. Speaking to the Associated Press, Feith took umbrage at descriptions that his work was “inappropriate.” Said he: “The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq-war work was somehow ‘unlawful’ or ‘unauthorized.’” He has a point: it was the Bush administration that chose Feith’s reports over those generated by its $1 billion-a-week intelligence operation. Feith’s work was most certainly authorized — from the very top.

Source: Time: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1587982,00.html

She was really my kinda gal: her heart was always with the common man and the progressive cause, but her trenchant critiques and her rapier wit cut the Left as easily as the Right.

She was nobody's fool. She could boil endless layers of Beltway gobbledegookdown to straight and simple talk without even trying, and she could depants a Texas politician in a New York minute with a single well-turned phrase. I lost count of the times I breathed an explosive sigh of relief after reading some of those phrases, as if she had taken a huge burden off of me by speaking the straight and simple truth when all around was confusion and noise.

But maybe more importantly, her aim was true. I haven't done a count, but having read her over the years, I think the record would show that she was right on the money most of the time.

She had so many brilliant quotes, it's impossible to choose one carefully, so here's one more or less selected at random:

Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?

Oh, it's just that your life is at stake.

She is also the one who coined the President's nicknames of "Dubya" and "Shrub."

I won't try to tell her story here--there are hundreds to choose from. But if you aren't familiar with her work, I encourage you to take a look at her thousands of articles and her many books. Or maybe you'd like to check out the half-dozen blogs in which I featured her work.

She was an American treasure. The only other person I can think of who can hold a candle to her unabashed progressiveness, and her plainspoken, incisive wit, is Jim Hightower...and I pray for his good health.

I'll be missing you, Molly. Missing ya huge. Nobody did it better.

Letting her have the last word, then, here's her last column.

--C]]> Folks,

The progressive cause lost one of its very best and brightest yesterday, as Molly Ivins succumbed to cancer.

She was really my kinda gal: her heart was always with the common man and the progressive cause, but her trenchant critiques and her rapier wit cut the Left as easily as the Right.

She was nobody’s fool. She could boil endless layers of Beltway gobbledegookdown to straight and simple talk without even trying, and she could depants a Texas politician in a New York minute with a single well-turned phrase. I lost count of the times I breathed an explosive sigh of relief after reading some of those phrases, as if she had taken a huge burden off of me by speaking the straight and simple truth when all around was confusion and noise.

But maybe more importantly, her aim was true. I haven’t done a count, but having read her over the years, I think the record would show that she was right on the money most of the time.

She had so many brilliant quotes, it’s impossible to choose one carefully, so here’s one more or less selected at random:

Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair’s-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?

Oh, it’s just that your life is at stake.

She is also the one who coined the President’s nicknames of “Dubya” and “Shrub.”

I won’t try to tell her story here–there are hundreds to choose from. But if you aren’t familiar with her work, I encourage you to take a look at her thousands of articles and her many books. Or maybe you’d like to check out the half-dozen blogs in which I featured her work.

She was an American treasure. The only other person I can think of who can hold a candle to her unabashed progressiveness, and her plainspoken, incisive wit, is Jim Hightower…and I pray for his good health.

I’ll be missing you, Molly. Missing ya huge. Nobody did it better.

Letting her have the last word, then, here’s her last column.

–C

Molly Ivins: Stand Up Against the ‘Surge’

Original Source

Posted on Jan 11, 2007

By Molly Ivins

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that we simply cannot let it continue.

It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. “You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically,” he said.

His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of the goals for the additional troops.

Bush’s call for a “surge” or “escalation” also goes against the Iraq Study Group. Talk is that the White House has planned to do anything but what the group suggested after months of investigation and proposals based on much broader strategic implications.

About the only politician out there besides Bush actively calling for a surge is Sen. John McCain. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote: “The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own—impose its rule throughout the country. … By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis the best possible chance to succeed.” But with all due respect to the senator from Arizona, that ship has long since sailed.

A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country—we have voted overwhelmingly against this war in polls (about 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent) and at the polls. We know this is wrong. The people understand, the people have the right to make this decision, and the people have the obligation to make sure our will is implemented.

Congress must work for the people in the resolution of this fiasco. Ted Kennedy’s proposal to control the money and tighten oversight is a welcome first step. And if Republicans want to continue to rubber-stamp this administration’s idiotic “plans” and go against the will of the people, they should be thrown out as soon as possible, to join their recent colleagues.

Anyone who wants to talk knowledgably about our Iraq misadventure should pick up Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.” It’s like reading a horror novel. You just want to put your face down and moan: How could we have let this happen? How could we have been so stupid?

As The Washington Post’s review notes, Chandrasekaran’s book “methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated U.S. attempts to influence Iraq’s fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis.”

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, “Stop it, now!”

Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Her most recent book is An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire. Among her many other books are two that she co-authored with our champion of justice, Noam Chomsky!

I found this video in another blog, While the Earth Burns by Jeremy Kirouac, a hip Canadian cat with a blog that feels like one of GRL's Canadian brethren. Check it out, there's a lot of interesting video material there. He says:

This is a 'must see' 64 minute documentary film.

In 1997 Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things. In 2004 she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.

The film examines the widely unregarded worlds of Anthropology and Geopolitics in a very dynamic manner, and is probably stylistically quite unlike any documentary that you have previously seen.

It covers the world politics of power, war, corporations, deception and exploitation. It is particularly hard hitting when it comes to the United States and western powers in general.

Its unconventional style has proven to be very successful in engaging younger viewers - many of whom find more traditional content dealing with these subjects quite dry and uninteresting. It is almost in the style of a music video, featuring contemporary music (lush, curve, love & rockets, boards of canada, nine inch nails, dead can dance, amon tobin, massive attack, totoise, telepop, placebo and faith less) overlaid with the words of Arundhati Roy, and images of humanity and the world we live in today

--C]]>

It’s not easy to get your head around all that’s happening in the world today, but Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy does a very effective job of rounding it up without sacrificing the truth. I think she has a fearless, fair, and balanced view of what’s happening in the world, but it might hurt a little. As she says at the outset of this video, she has a critique of nationalism, and it is also indeed a critique of American foreign policy, particularly toward Israel, but it’s not anti-national, or anti-American, while still remaining sympathetic to the Palestinians. She has her detractors, as dutifully listed in her Wiki, but every revolutionary does, and besides, having a ballyhooed economist call your critique of globalization “shallow” is sort of self-reinforcing, isn’t it? I think she’s got a great message with lots of good food for thought.

Her most recent book is An Ordinary Person’s Guide To Empire. Among her many other books are two that she co-authored with our champion of justice, Noam Chomsky!

I found this video in another blog, While the Earth Burns by Jeremy Kirouac, a hip Canadian cat with a blog that feels like one of GRL’s Canadian brethren. Check it out, there’s a lot of interesting video material there. He says:

This is a ‘must see’ 64 minute documentary film.

In 1997 Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things. In 2004 she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.

The film examines the widely unregarded worlds of Anthropology and Geopolitics in a very dynamic manner, and is probably stylistically quite unlike any documentary that you have previously seen.

It covers the world politics of power, war, corporations, deception and exploitation. It is particularly hard hitting when it comes to the United States and western powers in general.

Its unconventional style has proven to be very successful in engaging younger viewers – many of whom find more traditional content dealing with these subjects quite dry and uninteresting. It is almost in the style of a music video, featuring contemporary music (lush, curve, love & rockets, boards of canada, nine inch nails, dead can dance, amon tobin, massive attack, totoise, telepop, placebo and faith less) overlaid with the words of Arundhati Roy, and images of humanity and the world we live in today

–CArundhati
Roy – We (Video)

Home page for this video: http://www.weroy.org/index.shtml

About The Film

“We” is a free documentary produced by an anonymous student in New Zealand. He (or She) goes by the name “anon”. It was released for free on the Internet and first appeared at an Australian web site called resist.com.au. ”

“This is an unusual kind of underground production. An anonymous sympathiser has edited a video recording of Roy’s speech over 64 minutes, interspersing an impressive array of archival footage to illustrate themes and specific historical events. Contemporary music overlaid throughout the piece shifts the mood and quickens the pace. The result is a visual essay rather than a traditional documentary, perfectly suited to its creator’s intentions, which is to spread the anti-imperialist, social justice politics of Arundhati Roy everywhere.”

We must, MUST, make a change, and now. This country simply cannot afford to continue in the direction we're going. We can't afford it financially, we can't afford it in our civil relations with the rest of the world, we can't afford it environmentally, and most of all, we can't afford it morally.

Here are a few facts, for your consideration:

The Economy

• Bush inherited a surplus of around $236 billion from 2000. In four years, he and his radical Republican controlled Congress have managed to turn that into a $750 billion deficit, and set a historic record for an annual deficit in 2004. Between the present value of future revenues and future commitments, there is a whopping $44 trillion gap. Now look, I don't care what they call it, this is not fiscal conservatism. How much is $44 trillion? Well here's what some economists from the Fed and the Treasury say could be done about the gap: The goverment could raise the federal income tax (for individuals and corporates) by 69%, or raise payroll taxes by 95%; or cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 56%; or cut federal discretionary spending altogether - to zero. Does Bush's promise to continue resolutely down this path still sound comforting to you?
• This is the weakest jobs recovery ever since WW2. The unemployment rate would be much higher if not for people who've stopped looking or have been unemployed for a long time (and are thus no longer counted), and/or people who have multiple jobs or are "self employed" which often means no benefits and much lower income. A truer measure is the "labor participation rate," which has fallen to 65.9% from a peak of 67.3% in January 2000. That might not sound like much, but it represents two million newly unemployed. (And yours truly was one of them for a while.)
• Salary and wages rose just 2.4% over the past year , the smallest increase on record, while real disposable income rose just 1.4% in the third quarter, down from 2.4% in the second. What's more, the personal savings rate fell to 0.4%, the lowest since the Great Depression.
• The number of people living in poverty (especially children) has risen sharply in the past four years. Meanwhile, compensation for corporate CEOs is now over 419 times the income of hourly production workers. And those are the people who get nearly all of the benefit of Bush's tax cuts.
• The government has expanded tremendously under Bush, who has never vetoed a single spending bill. Spending has risen by $530B since 2000, a 30% increase. And the increase isn't just about the wars, either--that only accounts for 30% of it. The rest is due to his tax cuts, and increased health care, unemployment, Social Security, and Medicare costs. To borrow the old club that the GOP liked to use on liberals, Bush is a tax-cut-and-spend "conservative." If you're for smaller government, and lower government spending, then you cannot vote for Bush.
• Under the Bush administration, reduced federal aid to communities and states has resulted in cut services, not to mention a profusion of new spending measures on county ballots across the country. You gotta pay for it somewhere, folks. If you think Bush's tax cuts are going to put money in your pocket, you're dreamin'. It goes right back out an even bigger hole in your other pocket, including higher Social Security and Medicare payments for lesser services.

The War on Terror

First off, you have to realize that you've been sold a bill of goods. Hornswoggled. Baited and switched. Taken for a big, fat, $200 billion ride that left you very unpopular with the rest of the world, and with about 10x as many "terrorists" as you started. They've lied, they've dissembled, they've misled, they've misconstrued, but the truth is, Bush and co. had decided long before 9/11 to invade Iraq and to prosecute a "never ending" war of imperial ambition against much of the rest of the world...especially countries with lots of oil. Not because we wanted to grab the oil for our own immediate use, but because this administration knows, like no administration before, how critical this diminishing resource is to the future of our economy, and to our economic leverage over the rest of the world for generations to come. It's about control of the oil.

• It was never about wanting the Iraqis to be free (if it was, we would have started somewhere higher up a very long list of countries, like, say, Saudi Arabia).
• It wasn't about his WMD--they didn't exist, and this administration knew there was no conclusive evidence they existed, but they sold us that bill of goods anyway. And now we've cozied up and played footsie with countries that we well know have WMD, but for various reasons of political expedience, they get a different standard of treatment.
• It wasn't about Saddam's human rights violations; again, if it were, there's a much longer list we could start with, say, China.
• It wasn't even about terror. There was no tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and they knew it. Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11, and yet Bush & Cheney have crisscrossed the country telling us that there was for the last several years. When they know it's false. If terror was what it was really about, then we wouldn't have opened a gaping wound that we don't know how to heal in the center of the Muslim world, where it will fester and breed millions more "terrorists." We would have taken out the real perpetrators of 9-11: the members of Al Qaeda and their largely Saudi Arabian roots. And we would have taken on all the other terrorist entities in the world...another long list. (You've got an absolute explosion of the number of "terrorists" worldwide over the last few years, and you still can believe that these "firm, resolved" policies will make you safer?)

No, it's a much longer, deeper, more intricate story than these little nursery rhymes they've packaged up for an ignorant and unthinking American audience. The real motivation is about geopolitical dominance. It's about control. And it has everything to do with energy, and nothing to do with our vaunted American ideals of freedom, democracy, and justice. Everybody in the world except Americans seems to know this.

The Environment

There isn't enough time or space to cover this topic. This administration has sided every time with big business, and against protecting the health of its citizens, and of the environment. They use a lot of clever, Orwellian labels to disguise their true intent, but the fact is, they are destroying the environment as fast as they can. The air, the water, the soil, the food, the lot. Mostly in the service of energy projects. This has led, and will lead, to illness and Death. Death of the animals, death of the plants, and death of the citizens. Global warming: it isn't just for liberals anymore.

Energy

It's the one thing no politician wants to talk about. It's the biggest issue of our lives, and the least reported on. The loss of energy production capacity will change everything, everything, you know as regular life. We have a rapidly diminishing chance to choose the right path and invest as quickly as possible into renewable energy. Bush and co. would have you choose the other path. They deride energy conservation, they scoff at higher efficiency standards, and pursue policies that will continue to suck up as much energy as we can from polluting, and dangerous, non-renewable energy sources, no matter who we have to step over to get it. And your children, and their children, and many generations of children to come will pay for it, in their health, in the hatred of other nations, and in blood. There is no other way to put it: We must change our ways now.

It's Your Turn

Go to the polls, and vote for a fighting chance at the future. I'll understand if you're a Republican who can't bring him or herself to vote for Kerry. But I hope you'll think a minute about the future you're leaving to those who come, and just skip that spot on the ballot. Your measly little tax cut really doesn't hold water up against the threat that Bush's policies have posed to your very existence. And if you think Bush is going to make you safer, maybe you ought to read what bin Laden actually said in his new video.

If you're still not convinced, then perhaps the four below articles, from prominent, conservative Republicans who have thought this one through, should make the picture of this election, forever muddied by mud slinging and distortion, crystal clear.

Do it for yourself, and do it for our future.

--C ]]> Folks,
As you go to vote today, whatever your party affiliation, I’m begging you to realize the importance of this vote, and the crucial neccesity of putting us back on the right track.

We must, MUST, make a change, and now. This country simply cannot afford to continue in the direction we’re going. We can’t afford it financially, we can’t afford it in our civil relations with the rest of the world, we can’t afford it environmentally, and most of all, we can’t afford it morally.

Here are a few facts, for your consideration:

The Economy

• Bush inherited a surplus of around $236 billion from 2000. In four years, he and his radical Republican controlled Congress have managed to turn that into a $750 billion deficit, and set a historic record for an annual deficit in 2004. Between the present value of future revenues and future commitments, there is a whopping $44 trillion gap. Now look, I don’t care what they call it, this is not fiscal conservatism. How much is $44 trillion? Well here’s what some economists from the Fed and the Treasury say could be done about the gap: The goverment could raise the federal income tax (for individuals and corporates) by 69%, or raise payroll taxes by 95%; or cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 56%; or cut federal discretionary spending altogether – to zero. Does Bush’s promise to continue resolutely down this path still sound comforting to you?
• This is the weakest jobs recovery ever since WW2. The unemployment rate would be much higher if not for people who’ve stopped looking or have been unemployed for a long time (and are thus no longer counted), and/or people who have multiple jobs or are “self employed” which often means no benefits and much lower income. A truer measure is the “labor participation rate,” which has fallen to 65.9% from a peak of 67.3% in January 2000. That might not sound like much, but it represents two million newly unemployed. (And yours truly was one of them for a while.)
• Salary and wages rose just 2.4% over the past year , the smallest increase on record, while real disposable income rose just 1.4% in the third quarter, down from 2.4% in the second. What’s more, the personal savings rate fell to 0.4%, the lowest since the Great Depression.
• The number of people living in poverty (especially children) has risen sharply in the past four years. Meanwhile, compensation for corporate CEOs is now over 419 times the income of hourly production workers. And those are the people who get nearly all of the benefit of Bush’s tax cuts.
• The government has expanded tremendously under Bush, who has never vetoed a single spending bill. Spending has risen by $530B since 2000, a 30% increase. And the increase isn’t just about the wars, either–that only accounts for 30% of it. The rest is due to his tax cuts, and increased health care, unemployment, Social Security, and Medicare costs. To borrow the old club that the GOP liked to use on liberals, Bush is a tax-cut-and-spend “conservative.” If you’re for smaller government, and lower government spending, then you cannot vote for Bush.
• Under the Bush administration, reduced federal aid to communities and states has resulted in cut services, not to mention a profusion of new spending measures on county ballots across the country. You gotta pay for it somewhere, folks. If you think Bush’s tax cuts are going to put money in your pocket, you’re dreamin’. It goes right back out an even bigger hole in your other pocket, including higher Social Security and Medicare payments for lesser services.

The War on Terror
First off, you have to realize that you’ve been sold a bill of goods. Hornswoggled. Baited and switched. Taken for a big, fat, $200 billion ride that left you very unpopular with the rest of the world, and with about 10x as many “terrorists” as you started. They’ve lied, they’ve dissembled, they’ve misled, they’ve misconstrued, but the truth is, Bush and co. had decided long before 9/11 to invade Iraq and to prosecute a “never ending” war of imperial ambition against much of the rest of the world…especially countries with lots of oil. Not because we wanted to grab the oil for our own immediate use, but because this administration knows, like no administration before, how critical this diminishing resource is to the future of our economy, and to our economic leverage over the rest of the world for generations to come. It’s about control of the oil.

• It was never about wanting the Iraqis to be free (if it was, we would have started somewhere higher up a very long list of countries, like, say, Saudi Arabia).
• It wasn’t about his WMD–they didn’t exist, and this administration knew there was no conclusive evidence they existed, but they sold us that bill of goods anyway. And now we’ve cozied up and played footsie with countries that we well know have WMD, but for various reasons of political expedience, they get a different standard of treatment.
• It wasn’t about Saddam’s human rights violations; again, if it were, there’s a much longer list we could start with, say, China.
• It wasn’t even about terror. There was no tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and they knew it. Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11, and yet Bush & Cheney have crisscrossed the country telling us that there was for the last several years. When they know it’s false. If terror was what it was really about, then we wouldn’t have opened a gaping wound that we don’t know how to heal in the center of the Muslim world, where it will fester and breed millions more “terrorists.” We would have taken out the real perpetrators of 9-11: the members of Al Qaeda and their largely Saudi Arabian roots. And we would have taken on all the other terrorist entities in the world…another long list. (You’ve got an absolute explosion of the number of “terrorists” worldwide over the last few years, and you still can believe that these “firm, resolved” policies will make you safer?)

No, it’s a much longer, deeper, more intricate story than these little nursery rhymes they’ve packaged up for an ignorant and unthinking American audience. The real motivation is about geopolitical dominance. It’s about control. And it has everything to do with energy, and nothing to do with our vaunted American ideals of freedom, democracy, and justice. Everybody in the world except Americans seems to know this.

The Environment
There isn’t enough time or space to cover this topic. This administration has sided every time with big business, and against protecting the health of its citizens, and of the environment. They use a lot of clever, Orwellian labels to disguise their true intent, but the fact is, they are destroying the environment as fast as they can. The air, the water, the soil, the food, the lot. Mostly in the service of energy projects. This has led, and will lead, to illness and Death. Death of the animals, death of the plants, and death of the citizens. Global warming: it isn’t just for liberals anymore.

Energy
It’s the one thing no politician wants to talk about. It’s the biggest issue of our lives, and the least reported on. The loss of energy production capacity will change everything, everything, you know as regular life. We have a rapidly diminishing chance to choose the right path and invest as quickly as possible into renewable energy. Bush and co. would have you choose the other path. They deride energy conservation, they scoff at higher efficiency standards, and pursue policies that will continue to suck up as much energy as we can from polluting, and dangerous, non-renewable energy sources, no matter who we have to step over to get it. And your children, and their children, and many generations of children to come will pay for it, in their health, in the hatred of other nations, and in blood. There is no other way to put it: We must change our ways now.

It’s Your Turn
Go to the polls, and vote for a fighting chance at the future. I’ll understand if you’re a Republican who can’t bring him or herself to vote for Kerry. But I hope you’ll think a minute about the future you’re leaving to those who come, and just skip that spot on the ballot. Your measly little tax cut really doesn’t hold water up against the threat that Bush’s policies have posed to your very existence. And if you think Bush is going to make you safer, maybe you ought to read what bin Laden actually said in his new video.

If you’re still not convinced, then perhaps the four below articles, from prominent, conservative Republicans who have thought this one through, should make the picture of this election, forever muddied by mud slinging and distortion, crystal clear.

Do it for yourself, and do it for our future.

–C

American Conservative magazine endorses Kerry: Kerry’s the One

Unfortunately, this election does not offer traditional conservatives an easy or natural choice and has left our editors as split as our readership. In an effort to deepen our readers’ and our own understanding of the options before us, we’ve asked several of our editors and contributors to make “the conservative case” for their favored candidate. Their pieces, plus Taki’s column closing out this issue, constitute TAC’s endorsement. —The Editors

Kerry’s the One

By Scott McConnell

There is little in John Kerry’s persona or platform that appeals to conservatives. The flip-flopper charge—the centerpiece of the Republican campaign against Kerry—seems overdone, as Kerry’s contrasting votes are the sort of baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up. (Bob Dole could tell you all about it.) But Kerry is plainly a conventional liberal and no candidate for a future edition of Profiles in Courage. In my view, he will always deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002.

But this election is not about John Kerry. If he were to win, his dearth of charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would face challenges from within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive initiatives by a Republican Congress. Much of his presidency would be absorbed by trying to clean up the mess left to him in Iraq. He would be constrained by the swollen deficits and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee.

It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush. To the surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into an important president, and in many ways the most radical America has had since the 19th century. Because he is the leader of America’s conservative party, he has become the Left’s perfect foil—its dream candidate. The libertarian writer Lew Rockwell has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II: both gained office as a result of family connections, both initiated an unnecessary war that shattered their countries’ budgets. Lenin needed the calamitous reign of Nicholas II to create an opening for the Bolsheviks.

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal—Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it—and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.

During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world. Of course there has always been “anti-Americanism.” After the Second World War many European intellectuals argued for a “Third Way” between American-style capitalism and Soviet communism, and a generation later Europe’s radicals embraced every ragged “anti-imperialist” cause that came along. In South America, defiance of “the Yanqui” always draws a crowd. But Bush has somehow managed to take all these sentiments and turbo-charge them. In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office. The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. It’s the same throughout the Middle East.

Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy doctrine under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country it wants if it feels threatened. It is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, but the latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe. If the analogy seems extreme, what is an appropriate comparison when a country manufactures falsehoods about a foreign government, disseminates them widely, and invades the country on the basis of those falsehoods? It is not an action that any American president has ever taken before. It is not something that “good” countries do. It is the main reason that people all over the world who used to consider the United States a reliable and necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a menace to their own peace and security.

These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire. More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists—indeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge. Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to America’s survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to provide full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world’s most hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help.

I’ve heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served prominently in his father’s administration say that he could not possibly have conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he was essentially taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to overturn Saddam Hussein. Bush’s public performances plainly show him to be a man who has never read or thought much about foreign policy. So the inevitable questions are: who makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the information flow to the president, how are various options are presented?

The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory. Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidency—and it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security Council in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to the Israeli embassy and another who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader have become key players in the making of American foreign policy.

But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed intellectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified support of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the future kingdom of Christ. These two strands of Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in the Bush presidency—and President Bush has given not the slightest indication he would restrain either in a second term. With Colin Powell’s departure from the State Department looming, Bush is more than ever the “neoconian candidate.” The only way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian Armageddon set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected.

If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward. But the most important battles will take place within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a huge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American past—and to make that case without a powerful White House pulling in the opposite direction.

George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by American armies—a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky’s concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His immigration policies—temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election—are just as extreme. A re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans “won’t do.” This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support.

November 8, 2004 issue
Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative

The New Yorker endorses Kerry:

The Choice

(Marlow W. Cook, a Republican formerly of Louisville, was Jefferson County judge from 1962-1968 and U.S. Republican Senator from Kentucky from 1968-1975.)

I have been, and will continue to be, a Republican. But when we as a party send the wrong person to the White House, then it is our responsibility to send him home if our nation suffers as a result of his actions. I fall in the category of good conservative thinkers, like George F. Will, for instance, who wrote: “This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and having thought, to have second thoughts.”

I say, well done George Will, or, even better, from the mouth of the numero uno of conservatives, William F. Buckley Jr.: “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”

First, let’s talk about George Bush’s moral standards.

In 2000, to defeat Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. — a man who was shot down in Vietnam and imprisoned for over five years — they used Carl Rove’s “East Texas special.” They started the rumor that he was gay, saying he had spent too much time in the Hanoi Hilton. They said he was crazy. They said his wife was on drugs. Then, to top it off, they spread pictures of his adopted daughter, who was born in Bangladesh and thus dark skinned, to the sons and daughters of the Confederacy in rural South Carolina.

To show he was not just picking on Republicans, he went after Sen. Max Cleland from Georgia, a Democrat seeking re-election. Bush henchmen said he wasn’t patriotic because Cleland did not agree 100 percent on how to handle homeland security. They published his picture along with Cuba’s Castro, questioning Cleland’s patriotism and commitment to America’s security. Never mind that his Republican challenger was a Vietnam deferment case and Cleland, who had served in Vietnam, came home in a wheel chair having lost three limbs fighting for his country. Anyone who wants to win an election and control of the legislative body that badly has no moral character at all.

We know his father got him in the Texas Air National Guard so he would not have to go to Vietnam. The religious right can have him with those moral standards. We also have Vice President Dick Cheney, who deferred his way out of Vietnam because, as he says, he “had more important things to do.”

I have just turned 78. During my lifetime, we have sent 31,377,741 Americans to war, not including whatever will be the final figures for the Iraq fiasco. Of those, 502,722 died and 928,980 came home without legs, arms or what have you.

Those wars were to defend freedom throughout the free world from communism, dictators and tyrants. Now Americans are the aggressors — we start the wars, we blow up all the infrastructure in those countries, and then turn around and spend tax dollars denying our nation an excellent education system, medical and drug programs, and the list goes on. …

I hope you all have noticed the Bush administration’s style in the campaign so far. All negative, trashing Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John Edwards and Democrats in general. Not once have they said what they have done right, what they have done wrong or what they have not done at all.

Lyndon Johnson said America could have guns and butter at the same time. This administration says you can have guns, butter and no taxes at the same time. God help us if we are not smart enough to know that is wrong, and we live by it to our peril. We in this nation have a serious problem. Its almost worse than terrorism: We are broke. Our government is borrowing a billion dollars a day. They are now borrowing from the government pension program, for apparently they have gotten as much out of the Social Security Trust as it can take. Our House and Senate announce weekly grants for every kind of favorite local programs to save legislative seats, and it’s all borrowed money.

If you listened to the President confirming the value of our war with Iraq, you heard him say, “If no weapons of mass destruction were found, at least we know we have stopped his future distribution of same to terrorists.” If that is his justification, then, if he is re-elected our next war will be against Iran and at the same time North Korea, for indeed they have weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, which they have readily admitted. Those wars will require a draft of men and women. …

I am not enamored with John Kerry, but I am frightened to death of George Bush. I fear a secret government. I abhor a government that refuses to supply the Congress with requested information. I am against a government that refuses to tell the country with whom the leaders of our country sat down and determined our energy policy, and to prove how much they want to keep that secret, they took it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Those of you who are fiscal conservatives and abhor our staggering debt, tell your conservative friends, “Vote for Kerry,” because without Bush to control the Congress, the first thing lawmakers will demand Kerry do is balance the budget.

The wonderful thing about this country is its gift of citizenship, then it’s freedom to register as one sees fit. For me, as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction.

If we are indeed the party of Lincoln (I paraphrase his words), a president who deems to have the right to declare war at will without the consent of the Congress is a president who far exceeds his power under our Constitution.

I will take John Kerry for four years to put our country on the right path.

(The Courier Journal, Kentucky, October 20, 2004 )

The Tampa Tribune endorses Kerry:

Why We Cannot Endorse President Bush For Re-Election

W e find ourselves in a position unimaginable four years ago when we strongly endorsed for president a fiscal conservative and “moderate man of mainstream convictions” who promised to wield military muscle only as a last resort and to resist the lure of “nation building.”

We find ourselves deeply conflicted today about the presidential race, skeptical of the promises and positions of Sen. John Kerry and disappointed by the performance of President George W. Bush.

As stewards of the Tribune’s editorial voice, we find it unimaginable to not be lending our voice to the chorus of conservative-leaning newspapers endorsing the president’s re- election. We had fully expected to stand with Bush, whom we endorsed in 2000 because his politics generally reflected ours: a strong military, fiscal conservatism, personal responsibility and small government. We knew him to be a popular governor of Texas who fought for lower taxes, less government and a pro-business constitution.

But we are unable to endorse President Bush for re- election because of his mishandling of the war in Iraq, his record deficit spending, his assault on open government and his failed promise to be a “uniter not a divider” within the United States and the world.

Neither can we endorse Sen. Kerry, whose undistinguished Senate record stands at odds with our conservative principles and whose positions on the Iraq war – the central issue in this campaign – have been difficult to distinguish or differentiate.

It is an achingly difficult decision to not endorse a candidate in the presidential contest, and we do not reach this decision lightly.

The Tribune has endorsed a Republican for president ever since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, with one exception. We did not endorse in the 1964 presidential race because, as we said at the time, “it is our feeling that unless a newspaper can recommend a candidate with complete conviction that he be the better choice for the office, it should make no endorsement.”

Like the country, this editorial board finds itself deeply divided about the president’s prosecution of the war and his indifference to federal spending.

Bush Overstated The Evidence

Although Bush came to office having lost the popular vote, the nation rallied behind him after the terrorist strikes of 9/11. He transcended the political divide and became everyone’s president the moment he picked up that bullhorn on the ashes of ground zero and promised the terrorists that they would hear from us. Aside from a few dancing extremists, the world stood with us.

Bush told us to wait, and we confidently stood with him. With surety and resolve, he struck Afghanistan and the hillside holes of al-Qaida extremists. For taking out the Taliban and bringing about national elections in Afghanistan this month, the president deserves much credit. While we still haven’t caught Osama bin Laden, the ace of spades, our troops have successfully caught and imprisoned many other al-Qaida leaders.

But before securing Afghanistan, Bush grew convinced that Iraq posed an imminent threat to America and so directed soldiers and supplies there.

His administration terrified us into believing that we had to quickly wage war with Baghdad to ensure our safety. Vice President Dick Cheney said he had “irrefutable evidence” that Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear program. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice wrongly asserted that aluminum tubes found in Iraq could be used only for nuclear weapons. And the president himself said he couldn’t wait for a smoking gun in the form of a “mushroom cloud.”

Again, this editorial board stood solidly with the president in his resolve to take the fight to the terrorists where they live, forever changing American foreign policy with our first-ever “pre-emptive” war.

Once we got to Baghdad, however, we found out that the president was wrong and that the reasons for launching the war were either exaggerated or inaccurate. There were no stockpiles of WMD and no link between Saddam and the terrorists that struck on 9/11.

As it turns out, the neoconservatives in the Bush administration were bamboozled by dubious sources named Curveball and Chalabi, whose integrity and access to real- time information was repeatedly questioned by our own intelligence services.

No Dissension Allowed

But groupthink took hold among the neocons, while those with contrary points of view, like Secretary of State Colin Powell, were sidelined until after key decisions were made. It was almost as though someone who asked tough questions was seen as siding with the terrorists.

When Gen. Eric Shinseki, then Army chief of staff, said that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure a postwar Iraq, his argument was dismissed and the general summarily pushed aside.

But after Baghdad fell, we saw how insufficient troop numbers led to the looting of hospitals, businesses and schools – everything but the Oil Ministry, which our forces secured.

At the time, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said with great hubris that the uprising was “untidy” but not unexpected. And the president himself challenged the enemy to “bring it on.”

Now we learn from Ambassador Paul Bremer, former presidential envoy to Iraq, that “we never had enough troops on the ground” to stop the insurgency. Baath party loyalists went underground only to launch a guerrilla campaign that makes Iraq less safe today than immediately after Baghdad fell.

The insurgents have taken back cities like Fallujah, which we mistakenly ceded to them last April. And they continue to undo the reconstruction of schools, roads, clinics and the electrical grid built by our troops and an array of mostly American contractors. Most problematic, they keep blowing up rebuilt oil pipelines whose revenues were supposed to pay for the reconstruction.

In one of his too-rare press conferences, the president stood strong in promising that Iraq would be sovereign by June 30, even though no one could identify who would get the keys to the country. Bush’s resolve in meeting the deadline for the creation of an interim government was commendable.

Still, despite deliberate steps to rebuild Iraq, we find ourselves today in an open-ended war that has taken the lives of 1,081 American servicemen and women, and wounded or maimed 7,862 more. Financially, the war has cost us $126 billion – money that could have been better spent securing the homeland – and is a major reason for the largest federal deficit in history.

More Fear Ahead

What bothers us is that the president says that even knowing what he knows now, he still would have invaded Iraq because Saddam had the “intent” to make nuclear weapons and was a ruthless dictator who killed his own people. If this nation-building succeeds, the president says, we will have built a friend in the Middle East.

Because of the invasion, one other renegade country – Libya – decided to disarm its nuclear program, a real success for the president.

Still, we are troubled by Bush’s talk about a broad “forward strategy of freedom” to “transform” the Middle East. We believe it unwise to use our military to impose democracy on Arab countries, which would rather determine their own future. We fear this model of forced democracy will only fuel recruiting campaigns for terrorism.

And how about Iran and North Korea, who have considerably more advanced nuclear capabilities than Iraq ever had? Are we going to brashly send our overstretched military to war there too?

An American president should take the country to war only as a last resort, only after exhausting every diplomatic channel and only after asking demanding questions and weighing concrete evidence. On the Iraq war, President Bush failed on all counts.

The Iraq war came about because of a profound failure of intelligence that went unchecked and unquestioned by the president, who shows no sign of having second doubts. He admits to making no mistakes except for a few presidential appointments – presumably disloyal people who dared to speak up.

Bush’s re-election campaign continues to stoke fear. “You better have a president who faces these terrorists down before they hurt us again,” he said in the first debate.

Cheney, who continues to maintain that Iraq was in league with al-Qaida despite evidence to the contrary, went so far as to say that electing Kerry would invite another terrorist strike.

We don’t like Kerry’s talk about a “global test,” but neither should we summarily dismiss the court of world opinion, which, you will remember, was with us less than three short years ago.

And finally, Bush has done little to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, a conflict that continues to ferment hatred in the Arab world.

Bush’s Spending Ways

While his prosecution of the war is the principal reason we cannot endorse the president’s re-election, we are also deeply disappointed by his failure to control federal spending.

It must be said that Bush has been a friend to business, and his promise to simplify the tax code is alluring. He also has dramatically reduced government regulations that slow commerce and cost money. As one example, he rightfully ended the requirement that businesses report any employee complaint of carpal tunnel syndrome.

It should also be noted that his tax cuts spurred a sputtering economy and benefited not only the rich, but the middle class too. He doubled the child credit to $1,000, reduced the marriage penalty and favored elimination of the death tax, all positions we supported.

However, although the numbers from recent months are more promising, the tax cuts did not spur the expected job growth. The nation has lost jobs during the Bush presidency, the first administration since Herbert Hoover’s to oversee a net loss of jobs.

But while the recession, 9/11 and profligate spending by Congress have grown the deficit, two-thirds can be traced back to the president’s tax cuts, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

Bush’s mistake was failing to couple tax cuts with reduced spending. Instead of asking some sacrifice from the public, he allowed Congress to keep spending, including a giveaway program of farm subsidies.

Bush has yet to veto a single spending bill. Even Franklin Roosevelt scaled back New Deal programs after Pearl Harbor.

The result: Bush has turned the $150 billion surplus he inherited into a $450 billion deficit.

At one point, Congress tried to impose some fiscal discipline. Lawmakers said they would not pass the Medicare prescription drug benefit if the cost exceeded $400 billion over 10 years.

So what did the administration do? It fudged the numbers.

Thomas Scully, former head of the Medicare agency, threatened to fire chief actuary Richard Foster if he dared to tell lawmakers that the true cost stood between $500 billion and $600 billion.

To make matters worse, the president’s law prohibits Medicare from negotiating the best prices from pharmaceutical companies.

Against this backdrop of spending, Bush announced a mission to Mars and support for a missile shield defense system, a Cold War throwback that would be nice to have but wouldn’t stop the car bombs and speedboats that are today’s terrorists’ weapons of choice.

At the same time, Bush has done nothing to shrink the size of the federal government. He has not cut one agency’s budget. In fact, at the Department of Education, he has actually increased spending by 68 percent.

We support a strong and accountable education system, but we do not support the added layer of federal regulation that Bush has imposed on Florida schools through his No Child Left Behind act.

The president modeled his plan after Florida’s A-Plus Plan, which was doing well enough by itself. Now we have two government programs that send conflicting messages to Florida parents, teachers and students.

Yet, while throwing money at programs of questionable urgency, Bush has failed to adequately fund the Department of Homeland Security. Penny- pinching there means firefighters and police still lack radios that can talk to one another, cargo shipments at airports and seaports are not screened, and hospitals and biohazard labs feel underfunded and underequipped.

Government Behind Closed Doors

At the birth of the 9/11 millennium, President Bush rallied us around a new world order that required some loss of freedoms so that the government could do a better job of protecting us.

He passed the Patriot Act, which, while not perfect, gives law enforcement agencies the much-needed ability to talk with one another.

While we supported the Patriot Act, we are concerned by the president’s relentless attack on open government.

According to the libertarian Reason Foundation, Bush has nearly doubled the number of classified documents, urged agencies to refuse Freedom of Information Act requests and invoked executive privilege wherever possible.

His administration doesn’t want citizens to know when hazardous chemicals are routed through their towns, how the repair of tenuous electric grids is going or who was at the table to form the nation’s energy policy.

Typical of this administration, only industry lobbyists and like-minded people were allowed at the table to craft the energy plan. People who might dissent – consumer groups and conservationists – were not invited.

Within a year of Cheney’s energy task force, the administration had given billions in subsidies to energy firms and begun weakening pollution laws while opening up wilderness areas to exploitation. The administration misled people by calling a plan to weaken pollution controls the Clear Skies initiative. As one example, the new law allows coal- burning power plants to avoid installing pollution-control equipment during renovations.

The Failed Compassionate Conservative

President Bush told us that he was “uniter, not a divider,” but shortly after taking office, his administration took a sharp right turn that has divided this country.

We were glad to see him sign the ban on late-term abortions. While we don’t favor the criminalization of abortion, we want to see the number of abortions reduced. It is not uncommon to place limits on freedoms, such as freedom of speech or freedom of assembly. Limits on abortion can be justified too.

We also agree that religion and tradition define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. However, we believe marriage laws should rightfully be left to the states. We don’t support the president’s decision to engage this country in a fight for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

Probably most disappointing, however, is his leadership in Washington.

Besides the White House, Republicans control the House and the Senate and all committee chairs. But rather than reach across the aisle, this president has deepened the divide in Congress, where Republican leaders have uninvited Democrats from conference committees where differences are reconciled. We would not condone such behavior from Democrats and shouldn’t accept it from Republicans.

We had expected something different, given Bush’s tenure in Texas.

People view Bush as a man with strong convictions. And while he’s clearly convinced of the rightness of his ways, that doesn’t mean he’s always right.

This president doesn’t try to hear from people who disagree, choosing instead to keep the counsel of staunch supporters. He disdains news conferences and brags that he doesn’t read the newspapers. He counts on his core group of insiders to tell him what he needs to know.

When asked if he consulted his father, the only other president to have waged war against Iraq, Bush unabashedly said that he spoke to a “higher father.” Presidential decisions about sending men and women to war should be based on fact, not prayer.

Still, the president seems like a nice guy. He is plain-spoken and says what he means. People who’ve met him come away impressed. If he were a drinking man, they say, they would enjoy having a beer with him. But we’re not electing Mr. Congeniality. We’re electing the leader of the free world and should set a higher standard than likability.

On a large scale, Bush has failed to deliver on his promise to be a compassionate conservative.

Kerry Concerns Us Too

We have written today mostly about Bush because he was our choice the last time around and we believed his conservative principles were most closely aligned with ours.

But neither do we see the senator from Massachusetts as someone we can endorse.

We’re not sure what Kerry thinks. He supported the war in Iraq, then opposed adequately funding the troops. His plan to secure the peace in Iraq is to cozy up to European countries that don’t have our interests at heart.

This is the same man who as a senator for 20 years has no significant legislation to his name and voted against all of the major weapons systems that have made America the most powerful country in the world.

Kerry would repeal Bush’s tax cut for Americans who earn more than $200,000, but he doesn’t say how he would create his promised 10 million jobs. And he promises to lower health insurance premiums, though the math looks fuzzy.

He made veracity an issue by putting his noble service in Vietnam front and center in his campaign. He wants to be treated as a hero, but 30 years ago he claimed Americans committed atrocities. He seems shocked that people doubt him and don’t consider him a hero.

Early Voting Starts Tomorrow

When early voting opens in Florida on Monday, you can begin going to the polls to pick the leader you think will best protect us and move our country forward.

The president’s backers argue that his resolve and strength prove him to be the best leader for the next four years. Kerry’s people argue that it’s time for a change.

You’ve heard from the candidates and you’ve heard our analysis.

Now it’s time for you to vote.

Voting is a matter of faith, since no one can predict what either candidate will do. Voting is a personal choice, one of the most personal things we do. We encourage you to look deep within yourself and choose the candidate you think most clearly represents your views.

Of one thing we are certain: America is the greatest country on earth and will survive, no matter the outcome on Nov. 2.

--C

The Covert Kingdom: Thy Will be Done, On Earth as It is in Texas
by Joe Bageant
25 May 2004
Source: Counterpunch

]]> Folks,

Here’s an article related to the last, examining the feelings of Bush-supporting churchgoers. This one ought to be required reading for any liberal heathen.

–C

The Covert Kingdom: Thy Will be Done, On Earth as It is in Texas

by Joe Bageant

25 May 2004

Source: Counterpunch

Not long ago I pulled my car up alongside a tiny wooden church in the woods, a stark white frame box my family built in 1840. And as always, an honest-to-god chill went through me, for the ancestral ghosts presumably hovering over the graves there. From
the wide open front door the Pentecostal preacher’s message echoed from within the plain wooden walls: “Thank you Gawd for giving us strawng leaders like President Bush during this crieeesis. Praise you Lord and guide him in this battle with Satan’s Muslim
armies.” If I had chosen to go back down the road a mile or so to the sprawling new Bible Baptist church – complete with school facilities, professional sound system and in-house television production – I could have heard approximately the same exhortation.
Usually offered at the end of a prayer for sons and daughters of members in the congregation serving in Iraq, it can be heard in any of the thousands upon thousands of praise temples across our republic.

After a lifetime of identity conflict, I have come to accept that, blood-wise, if not politically or spiritually, these are my people. And as a leftist it is very clear to me these days why urban liberals not only fail to understand these people, but do
not even know they exist, other than as some general lump of ignorant, intolerant voters called “the religious right,” or the “Christian Right,” or “neocon Christians.” But until progressives come to understand what these people
read, hear, are told and deeply believe, we cannot understand American politics, much less be effective. Given fundamentalist Christianity’s inherent cultural isolation, it is nearly impossible for most enlightened Americans to imagine, in honest human terms,
what fundamentalist Americans believe, let alone understand why we should all care.

For liberals to examine the current fundamentalist phenomenon in America is accept some hard truths. For starters, we libs are even more embattled than most of us choose to believe. Any significant liberal and progressive support is limited to a few urban
pockets on each coast and along the upper edge of the Midwestern tier states. Most of the rest of the nation, the much vaunted heartland, is the dominion of the conservative and charismatic Christian. Turf-wise, it’s pretty much their country, which is to say
it presently belongs to George W. Bush for some valid reasons. Remember: He did not have to steal the entire election, just a little piece of it in Florida. Evangelical born-again Christians of one stripe or another were then, and are now, 40% of the electorate,
and they support Bush 3-1. And as long as their clergy and their worst instincts tell them to, they will keep on voting for him, or someone like him, regardless of what we view as his arrogant folly and sub-intelligence.

Forget about changing their minds. These
Christians do not read the same books we do, they do not get their information from anything remotely resembling reasonably balanced sources, and in fact, consider even CBS and NBC super-liberal networks of porn and the Devil’s lies. Given how fundamentalists
see the modern world, they may as well be living in Iraq or Syria, with whom they share approximately the same Bronze Age religious tenets. They believe in God, Rumsfeld’s Holy War and their absolute duty as God’s chosen nation to kick Muslim ass up one side
and down the other. In other words, just because millions of Christians appear to be dangerously nuts does not mean they are marginal.

Having been born into a Southern Pentecostal/Baptist family of many generations, and living in this fundamentalist social landscape means that I gaze into the maw of neocon Christianity daily. Hell, sometimes hourly. My brother is a fundamentalist preacher,
as are a couple of my nephews, as were many of my ancestors going back to god-knows-when. My entire family is born-again; their lives are completely focused inside their own religious community, and on the time when Jesus returns to earth – Armageddon and The
Rapture.

Only another liberal born into a fundamentalist clan can understand what a strange, sometimes downright hellish family circumstance it is – how such a family can love you deeply, yet despise everything you believe in, see you as a humanist instrument of
Satan, and still be right there for you when your back goes out or a divorce shatters your life. As a socialist and a half-assed lefty activist, obviously I do not find much conversational fat to chew around the Thanksgiving table. Politically and spiritually,
we may be said to be dire enemies. Love and loathing coexist side by side. There is talk, but no communication. In fact, there are times when it all has science fiction overtonestimes when it seems we are speaking to one another through an unearthly veil, wherein
each party knows it is speaking to an alien. There is a sort of high eerie mental whine in the air. This is the sound of mutually incomprehensible worlds hurtling toward destiny, passing with great psychological friction, obvious to all, yet acknowledged by
none.

Between such times, I wait rather anxiously and strive for change, for relief from what feels like an increased stifling of personal liberty, beauty, art, and self-realization in America. They wait in spooky calmness for Jesus. They believe that, until
Jesus does arrive, our “satanic humanist state and federal legal systems” should be replaced with pure “Biblical Law.” This belief is called Christian Reconstructionism. Though it has always been around in some form, it began expanding rapidly
about 1973, with the publication of R. J. Rushdoony’s, Institutes of Biblical Law (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1982).

Time out please In a nod toward fairness and tolerance – begging the question of whether liberals are required to tolerate the intolerant – I will say this: Fundamentalists are “good people.” In daily life, they are warm-hearted and generous to
a fault. They live with feet on the ground (albeit with eyes cast heavenward) and with genuine love and concern for their neighbors. After spending 30 years in progressive western cities such as Boulder, Colorado and Eugene, Oregon, I would have to say that
conservative Christians actually do what liberals usually only talk about. They visit the sick and the elderly, give generously of their time and money to help those in need, and put unimaginable amounts of love and energy into their families, even as Pat Robertson
and Rush Limbaugh blare in the background. Their good works extend internationally – were it not for American Christians, there would be little health care on the African continent and other similar places. OK, that’s the best I can do in showing due respect
for the extreme Christian Right. Now to get back to the Christian Reconstructionists…
Establishing a Savage Eden
Christian Reconstruction is blunt stuff, hard and unforgiving as a gravestone.

Capital punishment, central to the Reconstructionist ideal, calls for the death penalty in a wide range of crimes, including abandonment of the faith, blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, striking a parent, and ”unchastity
before marriage” (but for women only.) Biblically correct methods of execution include stoning, the sword, hanging, and burning. Stoning is preferred, according to Gary North, the self-styled Reconstructionist economist, because stones are plentiful and cheap.

Biblical Law would also eliminate labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools. Leading Reconstruction theologian David Chilton declares, “The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics” Incidentally,
said Republic of Jesus would not only be a legal hell, but an ecological one as well – Reconstructionist doctrine calls for the scrapping of environmental protection of all kinds, because there will be no need for this planet earth once The Rapture occurs.
You may not have heard of Rushdoony or Chilton or North, but taken either separately or together, they have directly and indirectly influenced far more contemporary American minds than Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Howard Zinn combined.

A moreover covert movement, although slightly more public of late, Christian Reconstructionism and Dominionism have for decades exerted one hell of an influence through its scores of books, publications and classes taught in colleges and universities. Over
the past 30 years their doctrine has permeated not only the religious right, but mainstream churches as well, via the charismatic movement. The radical Christian right’s impact on politics and religion in this nation has been massive, with many mainstream churches
pushed rightward by its pervasiveness without even knowing it. Clearly the Methodist church down the street from my house does not understand what it has become. Other mainstream churches with more progressive leadership, simply flinch and bow to the radicals
at every turn. They have to, if they want to retain members these days. Further complicating matters is that leading Recoconstruction thinkers, along with their fellow travelers, the Dominionists, are all but invisible to non-fundamentalist America.

(I will
spare you the agony of the endless doctrinal hair-splitting that comes with making fundamentalist distinctions of any sort – I would not do that to a dog. But if you are disposed toward self-punishment, you can take it upon yourself to learn the differences
between Dominionism, Pretribulationism, Midtribulationism, and Posttribulationism, Premillennialism, Millennialism I recommend the writings of the British author and scholar George Monbiot, who has put the entire maddening scheme of it all together – corporate
implications, governmental and psychological meaning – in a couple of excellent books.)

Fundamentalists such as my family have no idea how thoroughly they have been orchestrated by agenda-driven Christian media and other innovations of the past few decades. They probably would not care now, even if they knew. Like most of their tribe (dare
we say class, in a nation that so vehemently denies it has a class system?) they want to embrace some simple foundational truth that will rationalize all the conflict and confusion of a postmodern world. Some handbook that will neatly explain everything, make
all their difficult decisions for them. And among these classic American citizens, prone toward religious zealotry since the Great Awakening of the 18th Century, what rock could appear more dependable upon which to cling than the infallible Holy Bible? From
there it was a short step for Christian Dominionist leaders to conclude that such magnificent infallibility should be enforced upon all other people, in the same spirit as the Catholic Spanish Conquistadors or the Arab Muslim Moors before them. It’s an old,
old story, a brutal one mankind cannot seem to shake.

Christian Reconstruction and Dominionist strategists make clear in their writings that homeschooling and Christian academies have been and continue to create the Rightist Christian cadres of the future, enabling them to place ever-increasing numbers of believers
in positions of governmental influence. The training of Christian cadres is far more sophisticated than the average liberal realizes. There now stretches a network of dozens of campuses across the nation, each with its strange cultish atmosphere of smiling
Christian pod people, most of them clones of Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. But how many outsiders know the depth and specificity of political indoctrination in these schools? For example, Patrick Henry College in Purcellville,
Virginia, a college exclusively for Christian homeschoolers, offers programs in strategic government intelligence, legal training and foreign policy, all with a strict, Bible-based “Christian worldview.” Patrick Henry is so heavily funded by the Christian
right it can offer classes below cost.

In the Bush administration, seven percent of all internships are handed out to Patrick Henry students, along with many others distributed among similar religious rightist colleges. The Bush administration also recruits
from the faculties of these schools, i.e. the appointments of right-wing Christian activist Kay Coles James, former dean of the Pat Robertson School of government, as director of the U.S. office of personnel. What better position than the personnel office from
which to recruit more fundamentalists? Scratch any of these supposed academics and you will find a Christian zealot. I know because I have made the mistake of inviting a few of these folks to cocktail parties. One university department head told me he is moving
to rural Mississippi where he can better recreate the lifestyle of the antebellum South, and its “Confederate Christian values.” It gets real strange real quick.

Lest the these Christians be underestimated, remember that it was their strategists whose “stealth ideology” managed the takeover of the Republican Party in the early 1990s. That takeover now looks mild in light of today’s neocon Christian implantations
in the White House, the Pentagon and the Supreme Court and other federal entities. As much as liberals screech in protest, few understand the depth and breadth of the Rightist Christian takeover underway. They catch the scent but never behold the beast itself.

Yesterday I heard a liberal Washington-based political pundit on NPR say the Radical Christian right’s local and regional political action peak was a past fixture of the Reagan era. I laughed out loud (it was a bitter laugh) and wondered if he had ever driven
20 miles eastward on U.S. Route 50 into the suburbs of Maryland, Virginia or West Virginia. The fellow on NPR was a perfect example of the need for liberal pundits to get their heads out of their asses, get outside the city, quit cruising the Internet and meet
some Americans who do not mirror their own humanist educations and backgrounds.

If they did, they would grasp the importance The Rapture has taken on in American national and international politics. Despite the media’s shallow interpretation of The Rapture’s significance, it is a hell of a lot more than just a couple hundred million
Left Behind books sold. The most significant thing about the Left Behind series is that, although they are classified as “fiction,” most fundamentalist readers I know accept the series as an absolute reality soon coming to a godless
planet near you. It helps to understand that everything is literal in the Fundamentalist voter universe.
I’ll Fly Away, Oh Lordy (But you won’t.)
Yes, when The Rapture comes Christians with the right credentials will fly away. But you and I, dear reader, will probably be among those who suffer a thousand-year plague of boils. So stock up on antibiotics, because according to the “Rapture Index”
it is damned near here. See for yourself at
http://www.raptureready.com. Part gimmick, part fanatical obsession, the index is a compilation of such things as floods, interest rates, oil prices, global turmoil As I write this the index stands at 144, just one
point below critical mass, when people like us will be smitten under a sky filled with deliriously happy naked flying Christians.

But to blow The Rapture off as amusing-if-scary fantasy is not being honest on my part. Cheap glibness has always been my vice, so I must say this: Personally, I’ve lived with The Rapture as the psychologically imprinted backdrop of my entire life. In fact,
my own father believed in it until the day he died, and the last time I saw him alive we talked about The Rapture. And when he asked me, “Will you be saved?” Will you be there with me on Canaan’s shore after The Rapture?” I was forced to feign
belief in it to give a dying man inner solace. But that was the spiritual stuff of families, and living and dying, religion in its rightful place, the way it is supposed to be, personal and intimate – not political. Thus, until the advent of the of the new
radical Christian influence, I’d certainly never heard The Rapture spoken about in the context of a Texan being selected by God to prepare its way.

Now however, this apocalyptic belief, yearning really, drives an American Christian polity in the service of a grave and unnerving agenda. The psuedo-scriptural has become an apocalyptic game plan for earthly political action: To wit, the messiah can only
return to earth after an apocalypse in Israel called Armageddon, which the fundamentalists are promoting with all their power so that The Rapture can take place. The first requirement was establishment of the state of Israel. Done. The next is Israel’s occupation
of the Middle East as a return of its “Biblical lands,” which in the radical Christian scheme of things, means more wars. These Christian conservatives believe peace cannot ever lead to The Rapture, and indeed impedes the 1,000 year Reign of Christ.
So anyone promoting peace is an enemy, a tool of Satan, hence the fundamentalist support for any and all wars Middle Eastern, in which their own kids die a death often viewed by Christian parents as a holy martyrdom of its own kind. “He (or she) died protecting
this country’s Christian values.” One hears it over and over from parents of those killed.

The final scenario of the Rapture has the “saved” Christians settling onto a cloud after the long float upward, from whence they watch a Rambo Jesus wipe out the remnants of the human race. Then in a mop-up operation by God, the Jews are also
annihilated, excepting a few who convert to Christianity. The Messiah returns to earth. End of story. Incidentally, the Muslim version, I was surprised to learn recently, is almost exactly the same, but with Muslims doing the cloud-sitting.

If we are lucky as a nation, this period in American history will be remembered as just another very dark time we managed to get through. Otherwise, one shudders to think of the logical outcome. No wonder the left is depressed. Meanwhile, our best thinkers
on the left ask us to consider our perpetual U.S. imperial war as a fascist, military/corporate war, and indeed it is that too. But tens of millions of hardworking, earnest American Christians see it as far more than that. They see a war against all that is
un-Biblical, the goal of which is complete world conquest, or put in Christian terminology, “dominion.” They will have no less than the “inevitable victory God has promised his new chosen people,” according to the Recon masters of the covert
kingdom. Screw the Jews, they blew their chance. If perpetual war is what it will take, then let it be perpetual. After all, perpetual war is exactly what the Bible promised. Like it or not, this is the reality (or prevailing unreality) with which we are faced.
The 2004 elections, regardless of outcome, will not change that. Nor will it necessarily bring ever-tolerant liberals to openly acknowledge what is truly happening in this country, the thing that has been building for a long, long time – a holy war, a covert
Christian jihad for control of America and the entire world. Millions of Americans are under the spell of an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis.

Pardon me, but religious tolerance be damned. Somebody had to say it.

Joe Bageant is a senior editor at the Primedia History Group and writes from Winchester, Virginia. He may be contacted at
bageantjb@netscape.net.

--C

Without a Doubt
October 17, 2004
New York Times Magazine
By Ron Suskind ]]> Folks,

This recent article from the New York Times Magazine is one of the most revealing I’ve read about the Bush presidency in a long time. It explains a lot, I think, about why it is so much more secretive than any presidency in recent memory; why the press is so cowed into meek submission in its coverage of the presidency; why Bush seems impervious to facts and intolerant of dissension; and why so many Christian Americans seem to support him unequivocally and unthinkingly. He seems to truly believe that his actions are indistinguishable from God’s will. His is a faith-based presidency, unapologetically out of touch with reality, and firmly resolved to stay that way. This is very sobering stuff. Highly recommended reading.

–C

Without a Doubt

October 17, 2004

New York Times Magazine

By Ron Suskind
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.)

he nation’s founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe’s state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority. But suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush — both captive and creator of this moment — has steadily, inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the faith-based presidency.

The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. The dome of silence cracked a bit in the late winter and spring, with revelations from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from the former Bush treasury secretary Paul O’Neill. When I quoted O’Neill saying that Bush was like ”a blind man in a room full of deaf people,” this did not endear me to the White House. But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush’s faith and certainty. These are among the sources I relied upon for this article. Few were willing to talk on the record. Some were willing to talk because they said they thought George W. Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire if he wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence fatigue — public servants, some with vast experience, who feel they have spent years being treated like Victorian-era children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it. But silence still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After many requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said in a letter that the president and those around him would not be cooperating with this article in any way.

Some officials, elected or otherwise, with whom I have spoken with left meetings in the Oval Office concerned that the president was struggling with the demands of the job. Others focused on Bush’s substantial interpersonal gifts as a compensation for his perceived lack of broader capabilities. Still others, like Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, are worried about something other than his native intelligence. ”He’s plenty smart enough to do the job,” Levin said. ”It’s his lack of curiosity about complex issues which troubles me.” But more than anything else, I heard expressions of awe at the president’s preternatural certainty and wonderment about its source.

There is one story about Bush’s particular brand of certainty I am able to piece together and tell for the record.

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ”road map” for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman — the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress — mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

”I don’t know why you’re talking about Sweden,” Bush said. ”They’re the neutral one. They don’t have an army.”

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ”Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They’re the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.” Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ”No, no, it’s Sweden that has no army.”

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos and grabbed him by the shoulder. ”You were right,” he said, with bonhomie. ”Sweden does have an army.”

This story was told to me by one of the senators in the Oval Office that December day, Joe Biden. Lantos, a liberal Democrat, would not comment about it. In general, people who meet with Bush will not discuss their encounters. (Lantos, through a spokesman, says it is a longstanding policy of his not to discuss Oval Office meetings.)

This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world’s most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, ”By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.”

He didn’t always talk this way. A precious glimpse of Bush, just as he was ascending to the presidency, comes from Jim Wallis, a man with the added advantage of having deep acuity about the struggles between fact and faith. Wallis, an evangelical pastor who for 30 years has run the Sojourners — a progressive organization of advocates for social justice — was asked during the transition to help pull together a diverse group of members of the clergy to talk about faith and poverty with the new president-elect.

In December 2000, Bush sat in the classroom of a Baptist church in Austin, Tex., with 30 or so clergy members and asked, ”How do I speak to the soul of the nation?” He listened as each guest articulated a vision of what might be. The afternoon hours passed. No one wanted to leave. People rose from their chairs and wandered the room, huddling in groups, conversing passionately. In one cluster, Bush and Wallis talked of their journeys.

”I’ve never lived around poor people,” Wallis remembers Bush saying. ”I don’t know what they think. I really don’t know what they think. I’m a white Republican guy who doesn’t get it. How do I get it?”

Wallis recalls replying, ”You need to listen to the poor and those who live and work with poor people.”

Bush called over his speechwriter, Michael Gerson, and said, ”I want you to hear this.” A month later, an almost identical line — ”many in our country do not know the pain of poverty, but we can listen to those who do” — ended up in the inaugural address.

That was an earlier Bush, one rather more open and conversant, matching his impulsiveness with a can-do attitude and seemingly unafraid of engaging with a diverse group. The president has an array of interpersonal gifts that fit well with this fearlessness — a headlong, unalloyed quality, best suited to ranging among different types of people, searching for the outlines of what will take shape as principles.

Yet this strong suit, an improvisational gift, has long been forced to wrestle with its ”left brain” opposite — a struggle, across 30 years, with the critical and analytical skills so prized in America’s professional class. In terms of intellectual faculties, that has been the ongoing battle for this talented man, first visible during the lackluster years at Yale and five years of drift through his 20′s — a time when peers were busy building credentials in law, business or medicine.

Biden, who early on became disenchanted with Bush’s grasp of foreign-policy issues and is among John Kerry’s closest Senate friends, has spent a lot of time trying to size up the president. ”Most successful people are good at identifying, very early, their strengths and weaknesses, at knowing themselves,” he told me not long ago. ”For most of us average Joes, that meant we’ve relied on strengths but had to work on our weakness — to lift them to adequacy — otherwise they might bring us down. I don’t think the president really had to do that, because he always had someone there — his family or friends — to bail him out. I don’t think, on balance, that has served him well for the moment he’s in now as president. He never seems to have worked on his weaknesses.”

Bush has been called the C.E.O. president, but that’s just a catch phrase — he never ran anything of consequence in the private sector. The M.B.A. president would be more accurate: he did, after all, graduate from Harvard Business School. And some who have worked under him in the White House and know about business have spotted a strange business-school time warp. It’s as if a 1975 graduate from H.B.S. — one who had little chance to season theory with practice during the past few decades of change in corporate America — has simply been dropped into the most challenging management job in the world.

One aspect of the H.B.S. method, with its emphasis on problems of actual corporations, is sometimes referred to as the ”case cracker” problem. The case studies are static, generally a snapshot of a troubled company, frozen in time; the various ”solutions” students proffer, and then defend in class against tough questioning, tend to have very short shelf lives. They promote rigidity, inappropriate surety. This is something H.B.S. graduates, most of whom land at large or midsize firms, learn in their first few years in business. They discover, often to their surprise, that the world is dynamic, it flows and changes, often for no good reason. The key is flexibility, rather than sticking to your guns in a debate, and constant reassessment of shifting realities. In short, thoughtful second-guessing.

George W. Bush, who went off to Texas to be an oil wildcatter, never had a chance to learn these lessons about the power of nuanced, fact-based analysis. The small oil companies he ran tended to lose money; much of their value was as tax shelters. (The investors were often friends of his father’s.) Later, with the Texas Rangers baseball team, he would act as an able front man but never really as a boss.

Instead of learning the limitations of his Harvard training, what George W. Bush learned instead during these fitful years were lessons about faith and its particular efficacy. It was in 1985, around the time of his 39th birthday, George W. Bush says, that his life took a sharp turn toward salvation. At that point he was drinking, his marriage was on the rocks, his career was listless. Several accounts have emerged from those close to Bush about a faith ”intervention” of sorts at the Kennebunkport family compound that year. Details vary, but here’s the gist of what I understand took place. George W., drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother’s. George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in probing exchanges and walks on the beach. George W. was soon born again. He stopped drinking, attended Bible study and wrestled with issues of fervent faith. A man who was lost was saved.

His marriage may have been repaired by the power of faith, but faith was clearly having little impact on his broken career. Faith heals the heart and the spirit, but it doesn’t do much for analytical skills. In 1990, a few years after receiving salvation, Bush was still bumping along. Much is apparent from one of the few instances of disinterested testimony to come from this period. It is the voice of David Rubenstein, managing director and cofounder of the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm that is one of the town’s most powerful institutions and a longtime business home for the president’s father. In 1989, the catering division of Marriott was taken private and established as Caterair by a group of Carlyle investors. Several old-guard Republicans, including the former Nixon aide Fred Malek, were involved.

Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension managers in Los Angeles last year, recalling that Malek approached him and said: ”There is a guy who would like to be on the board. He’s kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. . . . Needs some board positions.” Though Rubenstein didn’t think George W. Bush, then in his mid-40′s, ”added much value,” he put him on the Caterair board. ”Came to all the meetings,” Rubenstein told the conventioneers. ”Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years: ‘You know, I’m not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don’t think you’re adding that much value to the board. You don’t know that much about the company.’ He said: ‘Well, I think I’m getting out of this business anyway. And I don’t really like it that much. So I’m probably going to resign from the board.’ And I said thanks. Didn’t think I’d ever see him again.” [To read more of Rubenstein's speech, go here: http://prorev.com/bushcarlyle.htm.]

Bush would soon officially resign from Caterair’s board. Around this time, Karl Rove set up meetings to discuss Bush’s possible candidacy for the governorship of Texas. Six years after that, he was elected leader of the free world and began ”case cracking” on a dizzying array of subjects, proffering his various solutions, in both foreign and domestic affairs. But the pointed ”defend your position” queries — so central to the H.B.S. method and rigorous analysis of all kinds — were infrequent. Questioning a regional supervisor or V.P. for planning is one thing. Questioning the president of the United States is another.

Still, some couldn’t resist. As I reported in “The Price of Loyalty,” at the Bush administration’s first National Security Council meeting, Bush asked if anyone had ever met Ariel Sharon. Some were uncertain if it was a joke. It wasn’t: Bush launched into a riff about briefly meeting Sharon two years before, how he wouldn’t ”go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon. . . . I’m going to take him at face value,” and how the United States should pull out of the Arab-Israeli conflict because ”I don’t see much we can do over there at this point.” Colin Powell, for one, seemed startled. This would reverse 30 years of policy — since the Nixon administration — of American engagement. Such a move would unleash Sharon, Powell countered, and tear the delicate fabric of the Mideast in ways that might be irreparable. Bush brushed aside Powell’s concerns impatiently. ”Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things.”

Such challenges — from either Powell or his opposite number as the top official in domestic policy, Paul O’Neill — were trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months passed. He made that clear to his top lieutenants. Gradually, Bush lost what Richard Perle, who would later head a largely private-sector group under Bush called the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture during foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. (”He had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn’t know very much,” Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality. Even then, the circle around Bush was tightening. Top officials, from cabinet members on down, were often told when they would speak in Bush’s presence, for how long and on what topic. The president would listen without betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-discussions — Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly parrying on an issue — but the president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions.

Each administration, over the course of a term, is steadily shaped by its president, by his character, personality and priorities. It is a process that unfolds on many levels. There are, of course, a chief executive’s policies, which are executed by a staff and attending bureaucracies. But a few months along, officials, top to bottom, will also start to adopt the boss’s phraseology, his presumptions, his rhythms. If a president fishes, people buy poles; if he expresses displeasure, aides get busy finding evidence to support the judgment. A staff channels the leader.

A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush’s White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners. Already Bush was saying, Have faith in me and my decisions, and you’ll be rewarded. All through the White House, people were channeling the boss. He didn’t second-guess himself; why should they?

Considering the trials that were soon to arrive, it is easy to overlook what a difficult time this must have been for George W. Bush. For nearly three decades, he had sat in classrooms, and then at mahogany tables in corporate suites, with little to contribute. Then, as governor of Texas, he was graced with a pliable enough bipartisan Legislature, and the Legislature is where the real work in that state’s governance gets done. The Texas Legislature’s tension of opposites offered the structure of point and counterpoint, which Bush could navigate effectively with his strong, improvisational skills.

But the mahogany tables were now in the Situation Room and in the large conference room adjacent to the Oval Office. He guided a ruling party. Every issue that entered that rarefied sanctum required a complex decision, demanding focus, thoroughness and analytical potency.

For the president, as Biden said, to be acutely aware of his weaknesses — and to have to worry about revealing uncertainty or need or confusion, even to senior officials — must have presented an untenable bind. By summer’s end that first year, Vice President Dick Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their weekly lunch. The president was spending a lot of time outside the White House, often at the ranch, in the presence of only the most trustworthy confidants. The circle around Bush is the tightest around any president in the modern era, and ”it’s both exclusive and exclusionary,” Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative policy group, told me. ”It’s a too tightly managed decision-making process. When they make decisions, a very small number of people are in the room, and it has a certain effect of constricting the range of alternatives being offered.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, the country watched intently to see if and how Bush would lead. After a couple of days in which he seemed shaky and uncertain, he emerged, and the moment he began to lead — standing on the World Trade Center’s rubble with a bullhorn — for much of America, any lingering doubts about his abilities vanished. No one could afford doubt, not then. They wanted action, and George W. Bush was ready, having never felt the reasonable hesitations that slowed more deliberative men, and many presidents, including his father.

Within a few days of the attacks, Bush decided on the invasion of Afghanistan and was barking orders. His speech to the joint session of Congress on Sept. 20 will most likely be the greatest of his presidency. He prayed for God’s help. And many Americans, of all faiths, prayed with him — or for him. It was simple and nondenominational: a prayer that he’d be up to this moment, so that he — and, by extension, we as a country — would triumph in that dark hour.

This is where the faith-based presidency truly takes shape. Faith, which for months had been coloring the decision-making process and a host of political tactics — think of his address to the nation on stem-cell research — now began to guide events. It was the most natural ascension: George W. Bush turning to faith in his darkest moment and discovering a wellspring of power and confidence.

Of course, the mandates of sound, sober analysis didn’t vanish. They never do. Ask any entrepreneur with a blazing idea when, a few years along, the first debt payments start coming due. Or the C.E.O., certain that a high stock price affirms his sweeping vision, until that neglected, flagging division cripples the company. There’s a startled look — how’d that happen? In this case, the challenge of mobilizing the various agencies of the United States government and making certain that agreed-upon goals become demonstrable outcomes grew exponentially.

Looking back at the months directly following 9/11, virtually every leading military analyst seems to believe that rather than using Afghan proxies, we should have used more American troops, deployed more quickly, to pursue Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora. Many have also been critical of the president’s handling of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers; despite Bush’s setting goals in the so-called ”financial war on terror,” the Saudis failed to cooperate with American officials in hunting for the financial sources of terror. Still, the nation wanted bold action and was delighted to get it. Bush’s approval rating approached 90 percent. Meanwhile, the executive’s balance between analysis and resolution, between contemplation and action, was being tipped by the pull of righteous faith.

It was during a press conference on Sept. 16, in response to a question about homeland security efforts infringing on civil rights, that Bush first used the telltale word ”crusade” in public. ”This is a new kind of — a new kind of evil,” he said. ”And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.”

Muslims around the world were incensed. Two days later, Ari Fleischer tried to perform damage control. ”I think what the president was saying was — had no intended consequences for anybody, Muslim or otherwise, other than to say that this is a broad cause that he is calling on America and the nations around the world to join.” As to ”any connotations that would upset any of our partners, or anybody else in the world, the president would regret if anything like that was conveyed.”

A few months later, on Feb. 1, 2002, Jim Wallis of the Sojourners stood in the Roosevelt Room for the introduction of Jim Towey as head of the president’s faith-based and community initiative. John DiIulio, the original head, had left the job feeling that the initiative was not about ”compassionate conservatism,” as originally promised, but rather a political giveaway to the Christian right, a way to consolidate and energize that part of the base.

Moments after the ceremony, Bush saw Wallis. He bounded over and grabbed the cheeks of his face, one in each hand, and squeezed. ”Jim, how ya doin’, how ya doin’!” he exclaimed. Wallis was taken aback. Bush excitedly said that his massage therapist had given him Wallis’s book, ”Faith Works.” His joy at seeing Wallis, as Wallis and others remember it, was palpable — a president, wrestling with faith and its role at a time of peril, seeing that rare bird: an independent counselor. Wallis recalls telling Bush he was doing fine, ”’but in the State of the Union address a few days before, you said that unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on this war on terrorism, we’re going to lose.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, if we don’t devote our energy, our focus and our time on also overcoming global poverty and desperation, we will lose not only the war on poverty, but we’ll lose the war on terrorism.”’

Bush replied that that was why America needed the leadership of Wallis and other members of the clergy.

”No, Mr. President,” Wallis says he told Bush, ”We need your leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we’ll never defeat the threat of terrorism.”

Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They never spoke again after that.

”When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking,” Wallis says now. ”What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year — a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn’t want to hear from anyone who doubts him.”

But with a country crying out for intrepid leadership, does a president have time to entertain doubters? In a speech in Alaska two weeks later, Bush again referred to the war on terror as a ”crusade.”

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.”

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ”Look, I want your vote. I’m not going to debate it with you.” When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ”Look, I’m not going to debate it with you.”

The 9/11 commission did not directly address the question of whether Bush exerted influence over the intelligence community about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. That question will be investigated after the election, but if no tangible evidence of undue pressure is found, few officials or alumni of the administration whom I spoke to are likely to be surprised. ”If you operate in a certain way — by saying this is how I want to justify what I’ve already decided to do, and I don’t care how you pull it off — you guarantee that you’ll get faulty, one-sided information,” Paul O’Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. ”You don’t have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt.”

In a way, the president got what he wanted: a National Intelligence Estimate on W.M.D. that creatively marshaled a few thin facts, and then Colin Powell putting his credibility on the line at the United Nations in a show of faith. That was enough for George W. Bush to press forward and invade Iraq. As he told his quasi-memoirist, Bob Woodward, in ”Plan of Attack”: ”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 upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray to be as good a messenger of his will as possible.”

Machiavelli’s oft-cited line about the adequacy of the perception of power prompts a question. Is the appearance of confidence as important as its possession? Can confidence — true confidence — be willed? Or must it be earned?

George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history’s great confidence men. That is not meant in the huckster’s sense, though many critics claim that on the war in Iraq, the economy and a few other matters he has engaged in some manner of bait-and-switch. No, I mean it in the sense that he’s a believer in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality.

Whether you can run the world on faith, it’s clear you can run one hell of a campaign on it.

George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles — character, certainty, fortitude and godliness — rather than on what he says or does. The deeper the darkness, the brighter this filament of faith glows, a faith in the president and the just God who affirms him.

The leader of the free world is clearly comfortable with this calculus and artfully encourages it. In the series of televised, carefully choreographed ”Ask President Bush” events with supporters around the country, sessions filled with prayers and blessings, one questioner recently summed up the feelings of so many Christian conservatives, the core of the Bush army. ”I’ve voted Republican from the very first time I could vote,” said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin, Fla., as he stood before the president in a crowded college gym. ”And I also want to say this is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House.” Bush simply said ”thank you” as a wave of raucous applause rose from the assembled.

Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was reported to have said, ”I trust God speaks through me.” In this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but noted that ”his faith helps him in his service to people.”

A recent Gallup Poll noted that 42 percent of Americans identify themselves as evangelical or ”born again.” While this group leans Republican, it includes black urban churches and is far from monolithic. But Bush clearly draws his most ardent supporters and tireless workers from this group, many from a healthy subset of approximately four million evangelicals who didn’t vote in 2000 — potential new arrivals to the voting booth who could tip a close election or push a tight contest toward a rout.

This signaling system — forceful, national, varied, yet clean of the president’s specific fingerprint — carries enormous weight. Lincoln Chafee, the moderate Republican senator from Rhode Island, has broken with the president precisely over concerns about the nature of Bush’s certainty. ”This issue,” he says, of Bush’s ”announcing that ‘I carry the word of God’ is the key to the election. The president wants to signal to the base with that message, but in the swing states he does not.”

Come to the hustings on Labor Day and meet the base. In 2004, you know a candidate by his base, and the Bush campaign is harnessing the might of churches, with hordes of voters registering through church-sponsored programs. Following the news of Bush on his national tour in the week after the Republican convention, you could sense how a faith-based president campaigns: on a surf of prayer and righteous rage.

Righteous rage — that’s what Hardy Billington felt when he heard about same-sex marriage possibly being made legal in Massachusetts. ”It made me upset and disgusted, things going on in Massachusetts,” the 52-year-old from Poplar Bluff, Mo., told me. ”I prayed, then I got to work.” Billington spent $830 in early July to put up a billboard on the edge of town. It read: ”I Support President Bush and the Men and Women Fighting for Our Country. We Invite President Bush to Visit Poplar Bluff.” Soon Billington and his friend David Hahn, a fundamentalist preacher, started a petition drive. They gathered 10,000 signatures. That fact eventually reached the White House scheduling office.

By late afternoon on a cloudy Labor Day, with a crowd of more than 20,000 assembled in a public park, Billington stepped to the podium. ”The largest group I ever talked to I think was seven people, and I’m not much of a talker,” Billington, a shy man with three kids and a couple of dozen rental properties that he owns, told me several days later. ”I’ve never been so frightened.”

But Billington said he ”looked to God” and said what was in his heart. ”The United States is the greatest country in the world,” he told the rally. ”President Bush is the greatest president I have ever known. I love my president. I love my country. And more important, I love Jesus Christ.”

The crowd went wild, and they went wild again when the president finally arrived and gave his stump speech. There were Bush’s periodic stumbles and gaffes, but for the followers of the faith-based president, that was just fine. They got it — and ”it” was the faith.

And for those who don’t get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ”You think he’s an idiot, don’t you?” I said, no, I didn’t. ”No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!” In this instance, the final ”you,” of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

The bond between Bush and his base is a bond of mutual support. He supports them with his actions, doing his level best to stand firm on wedge issues like abortion and same-sex marriage while he identifies evil in the world, at home and abroad. They respond with fierce faith. The power of this transaction is something that people, especially those who are religious, tend to connect to their own lives. If you have faith in someone, that person is filled like a vessel. Your faith is the wind beneath his or her wings. That person may well rise to the occasion and surprise you: I had faith in you, and my faith was rewarded. Or, I know you’ve been struggling, and I need to pray harder.

Bush’s speech that day in Poplar Bluff finished with a mythic appeal: ”For all Americans, these years in our history will always stand apart,” he said. ”You know, there are quiet times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its leaders. This isn’t one of those times. This is a time that needs — when we need firm resolve and clear vision and a deep faith in the values that make us a great nation.”

The life of the nation and the life of Bush effortlessly merge — his fortitude, even in the face of doubters, is that of the nation; his ordinariness, like theirs, is heroic; his resolve, to whatever end, will turn the wheel of history.

Remember, this is consent, informed by the heart and by the spirit. In the end, Bush doesn’t have to say he’s ordained by God. After a day of speeches by Hardy Billington and others, it goes without saying.

”To me, I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down, to see the darkness and protect this nation,” Billington told me, voicing an idea shared by millions of Bush supporters. ”Other people will not protect us. God gives people choices to make. God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time.”

But when the moment came in the V.I.P. tent to shake Bush’s hand, Billington remembered being reserved. ”’I really thank God that you’re the president’ was all I told him.” Bush, he recalled, said, ”Thank you.”

”He knew what I meant,” Billington said. ”I believe he’s an instrument of God, but I have to be careful about what I say, you know, in public.”

Is there anyone in America who feels that John Kerry is an instrument of God?

”I’m going to be real positive, while I keep my foot on John Kerry’s throat,” George W. Bush said last month at a confidential luncheon a block away from the White House with a hundred or so of his most ardent, longtime supporters, the so-called R.N.C. Regents. This was a high-rolling crowd — at one time or another, they had all given large contributions to Bush or the Republican National Committee. Bush had known many of them for years, and a number of them had visited him at the ranch. It was a long way from Poplar Bluff.

The Bush these supporters heard was a triumphal Bush, actively beginning to plan his second term. It is a second term, should it come to pass, that will alter American life in many ways, if predictions that Bush voiced at the luncheon come true.

He said emphatically that he expects the Republicans will gain seats to expand their control of the House and the Senate. According to notes provided to me, and according to several guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about what they heard, he said that ”Osama bin Laden would like to overthrow the Saudis . . .

then we’re in trouble. Because they have a weapon. They have the oil.” He said that there will be an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and perhaps three more high-court vacancies during his second term.

”Won’t that be amazing?” said Peter Stent, a rancher and conservationist who attended the luncheon. ”Can you imagine? Four appointments!”

After his remarks, Bush opened it up for questions, and someone asked what he’s going to do about energy policy with worldwide oil reserves predicted to peak.

Bush said: ”I’m going to push nuclear energy, drilling in Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are interesting.” He mentions energy from ”processing corn.”

”I’m going to bring all this up in the debate, and I’m going to push it,” he said, and then tried out a line. ”Do you realize that ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] is the size of South Carolina, and where we want to drill is the size of the Columbia airport?”

The questions came from many directions — respectful, but clearly reality-based. About the deficits, he said he’d ”spend whatever it takes to protect our kids in Iraq,” that ”homeland security cost more than I originally thought.”

In response to a question, he talked about diversity, saying that ”hands down,” he has the most diverse senior staff in terms of both gender and race. He recalled a meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany. ”You know, I’m sitting there with Schröder one day with Colin and Condi. And I’m thinking: What’s Schröder thinking?! He’s sitting here with two blacks and one’s a woman.”

But as the hour passed, Bush kept coming back to the thing most on his mind: his second term.

”I’m going to come out strong after my swearing in,” Bush said, ”with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.” The victories he expects in November, he said, will give us ”two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I’ll be quacking like a duck.”

Joseph Gildenhorn, a top contributor who attended the luncheon and has been invited to visit Bush at his ranch, said later: ”I’ve never seen the president so ebullient. He was so confident. He feels so strongly he will win.” Yet one part of Bush’s 60-odd-minute free-form riff gave Gildenhorn — a board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a former ambassador to Switzerland — a moment’s pause. The president, listing priorities for his second term, placed near the top of his agenda the expansion of federal support for faith-based institutions. The president talked at length about giving the initiative the full measure of his devotion and said that questions about separation of church and state were not an issue.

Talk of the faith-based initiative, Gildenhorn said, makes him ”a little uneasy.” Many conservative evangelicals ”feel they have a direct line from God,” he said, and feel Bush is divinely chosen.

”I think he’s religious, I think he’s a born-again, I don’t think, though, that he feels that he’s been ordained by God to serve the country.” Gildenhorn paused, then said, ”But you know, I really haven’t discussed it with him.”

A regent I spoke to later and who asked not to be identified told me: ”I’m happy he’s certain of victory and that he’s ready to burst forth into his second term, but it all makes me a little nervous. There are a lot of big things that he’s planning to do domestically, and who knows what countries we might invade or what might happen in Iraq. But when it gets complex, he seems to turn to prayer or God rather than digging in and thinking things through. What’s that line? — the devil’s in the details. If you don’t go after that devil, he’ll come after you.”

Bush grew into one of history’s most forceful leaders, his admirers will attest, by replacing hesitation and reasonable doubt with faith and clarity. Many more will surely tap this high-voltage connection of fervent faith and bold action. In politics, the saying goes, anything that works must be repeated until it is replaced by something better. The horizon seems clear of competitors.

Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance — sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion — deal with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man’s faith? What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation the president feels he has with God — a colloquy upon which the world now precariously turns?

That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with George W. Bush. That’s impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the White House.

”Faith can cut in so many ways,” he said. ”If you’re penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it’s designed to certify our righteousness — that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There’s no reflection.

”Where people often get lost is on this very point,” he said after a moment of thought. ”Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not — not ever — to the thing we as humans so very much want.”

And what is that?

”Easy certainty.”

Ron Suskind was the senior national-affairs reporter for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000. He is the author most recently of ”The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill.”

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