Without a Doubt - By RON SUSKIND

[radfringe]

PRINT THIS ARTICLE OUT AND GIVE TO BUSH* VOTERS, E-MAIL IT, READ IT TO A FRIEND OVER THE PHONE

Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?oref=login&pagewanted=1&oref=login
Published: October 17, 2004


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.''

---snip---

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.''

[ramapo]

1. Civil war in the Republican Party?

How about just a plain ole civil war? Course that might happen if Kerry wins too as the Repubs will be very sore losers...I doubt there'll be a Kerry honeymoon, unless the Congress turns over too

[endnote]

2. Kerry can take it. It's gone through worse events unlike Chimpy

[classof56]

3. I read this article earlier today

and I'm convinced it will not change anyone's mind who believes Bush's statement that "God speaks through me", and that God has personally appointed Bush to lead our nation. That is extremely unfortunate, because for me the question is this: If Bush is a man of faith, the born-again Christian he claims to be, why does he feel the need to lie? And lie, and lie and lie again. Does God lie? Would Bush's savior Jesus Christ lie? Is this how God uses a human vessel to carry out His will--through lies, blatant, relentless lies? Maybe I've had it wrong all these years I have been a born-again believer, but I do not believe that's how God works and I have concluded that what I first was willing to accept--that when Bush says he's born again, he means it--is now just another one of his lies, designed to garner support from the right-wing fundamentalist base that are helping him carry out his goals.

Those right-wingers of all ilk who worship his Bushiness had best be careful what they wish for. If their godly hero pulls off the election (by hook or crook--not God's way, but Bush's of course) these folks will be very, very sorry when they see what they have wrought. Come Jan. 20, 2005, he won't need them anymore and after that, God help us all!

DEFEAT BUSH!!

[grasswire]

4. and....

...as another thread questions -- why did God give George wrong information on Saddam? George's God is always telling him things that lead to death and disfigurement and chaos. Something's wrong with George's faith.

[peacetalksforall]

5. George and his neo-cons and Fed Society members and swallowers love

executions, prisons, innocent people dying, soldiers dying, soldiers losing parts of their bodies-minds-immune systems, chemical and atom wipe-outs, and they never blame guns for innocents killed in schools or workplaces or buildings that are blown up - it's always the fault of techers, parents, Hollywood. They like putting a little risky squeeze on veterans and seniors. They love fetuses who get to live to be 19 so that there is a little tax revenue coming in before they are blown up on the battlefield. They love propagandic lies of all proportions, character assassinations, dirty and deathly intelligence games, spying, poisoning. What have I forgotten?

[classof56]

9. You nailed it--something is terribly wrong with George's faith

And one day soon, his blinded followers will realize it. Let us just hope and pray it's not too late for them, because if it is, it'll be too late for all of us.

[spooky3]

6. I wish those airline security agents hadn't taken my Swedish Army knife.

[Roland99]

7. Excellent article...here's the key portion, imo

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...


...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.''

That sums up Bush's presidency in a nice little soundbite.

Bush appears to be a very insecure, spoiled brat and he is leading our nation and directing foreign policy on faith, not debate. Making decisions on gut instincts and faith, not on consensus and reviewing facts.

Now we know John Kerry is right when he says Bush is wrong.


And this piece:
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.''

Scary shit....I'm telling you.


GET OUT THE VOTE!!!

[high density]

8. Bush to privatize social security

From the Suskind article:

"I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in," Bush said, "with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security."

From a CBS/AP article:

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry accused President Bush on Sunday of planning a surprise second-term effort to privatize Social Security and forecast a "disaster for America's middle class."

Republicans denied the charge as scare tactics with little more than two weeks remaining in a tight election. "It is just flat inaccurate," said GOP chairman Ed Gillespie.