Mar 31 2004
Faith based
Todays assignment…
by Jack Beatty, The Atlantic online George W. Bush has made rationality an antonym of Republican. His is the first faith-based presidency. Above the entrance to the Bush West Wing should be St. Paul’s definition of faith—”the evidence of things unseen.”
So much of President Bush has to be taken on faith. His integrity, for example. You have to trust the evidence of things unseen to believe him, for the visible evidence indicates a disposition toward deceit. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the cost of his prescription-drug bill, the effect of his tax cuts on the deficit, the number of lines of stem cells available to scientists after his restrictions on research. You name it—from who hung the Mission Accomplished banner up behind him for his “victory” strut on the USS Abraham Lincoln to his claims that on September 11 he, not the Air Force Chief of Staff, was the one to order the military to highest alert—he’s lied about it.
Alternatively, Bush could be seen as what Al Sharpton called “an unconscious liar.” He asks us to accept his feelings about something as evidence of the something. In this view, he’s not deceitful; he’s innocent of the procedures of rationality—he can’t think.
Or his troubles with truth arise because he bases his thoughts on authority not reality. Bush offered an example of his dependent mind on the night of his election. When Al Gore called to retract the concession he’d offered to Bush before the race tightened in Florida, Bush told him, My brother Jeb says I won fair and square. Gore came back that Bush’s “little brother” was not an oracle. He was to George. So Bush is not a liar; he says whatever his authority figures, “Dick” or “Rummy” or “Condi,” tell him he should say. In a recent edition, The Wall Street Journal had a long backgrounder on what Bush did on September 11, showing how, under Cheney’s control, the stream of his government flowed around the President as if nobody expected leadership from George.
Click on the headline to read the full article.
