The New York Times has a long, interesting analysis of President Bush today. Not that it's going to change anyone's minds, but I think it's pretty well-done.
The Decembrist more or less says what I was going to say, except that I felt from very early on this was all about religion and belief. I think being on the outside of the religious mainstream in the US helps sharpen your instincts on this point, but for all I know the Decembrist is Jewish, so maybe not.
I've felt for a while that September 11th took some otherwise normal people and turned them into rabid "get the Arabs" Bush supporters, but not many people have looked at what it did to Bush himself. This article doesn't make the point directly, but I think that change that Suskind points to, that of going from "a self-help Methodist" to "an American Calvinist" was very much a reaction to 9/11.
And then there's the people around Bush. This section pretty much sums it up:
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.''
Religious fervor, total arrogance, and dead-wrong political instincts. It would be hard to find a worse trifecta for the people running this country.
I just hope we start to find our way back to normalcy on Election Day.
