What's he on about now?

In case the articles, essays and opinions throughtout this site just weren't enough for you, here's my online diary (a.k.a. 'blog'). It's as close as you'll come to the inside of my head, so don't say I didn't warn you
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   Wednesday, October 20, 2004

LINES IN THE SAND

Hey, I was good -- I held back on the George Bush ranting for, what, two whole days? But a chilling New York Times Magazine piece by Ron Suskind (former national-affairs reporter for that left-wing rag The Wall Street Journal) has my blood boiling over once again. The piece is on -- what else? -- the utter incompetence of this president, only this time viewed through Bush's elevation of faith over reality. Suskind asserts that a "faith-based presidency" is bad for church AND state:

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!"
...
[Another] 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."

But why does this line in the sand exist at all? Can't one by a member of a faith-based community AND a reality-based community? Consider this exchange between Bush and evangelical pastor Jim Wallis "who for 30 years has run the Sojourners -- a progressive organization of advocates for social justice":

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...He is no longer invited to the White House.

Wallis gets the last word in this piece, because his opinion is both the most damning for George Bush and the most sane and rational for the rest of us:

Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not--not ever--to the thing we as humans so very much want...Easy certainty.

Labels: George W Bush