Month: October 2004

This is Bizzare

You know things are seriously messed up when even Pat Robertson is telling President Bush “I told you so” about Iraq:

“I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, ‘Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.’ ”

Robertson said the president then told him, “Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.”

[snip]

“I mean, the Lord told me it was going to be A, a disaster, and B, messy,” Robertson said. “I warned him about casualties.”

But I thought God talked to Bush too? I guess he got the message garbled.

UPDATE: WH spokesman Scott McClellan called Robertson a liar. Heh.

Pattern Recognition

I’ve been meaning to post a review of William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognittion” for quite a while now and still have not done so. It’s a book that moved me deeply in some ways and left me really annoyed in others, and I find it hard to wirte about that contradition. Hopefully I’ll get it finished eventually.

Good news today, though — Peter Weir wants to make it into a movie.

Time Passages

It has rained twice in the last few days — looks like the winter rainy season is starting a little early this year. It’s time to pack up the summer stuff and break out the sweaters.

Also, 10 years ago today Scott and I went out on our first date. Dinner and a movie — “Ed Wood” of all things. To commemorate the occasion, he surprised me with 2 dozen roses.

I’ve got a really wonderful guy.

Al Gore on GWB

The man who should have been President, Al Gore, gave a good speech recently about the problems with the Bush crew. Given the recent Suskind article this is worth a read.

There are many people in both political parties who worry that there is something deeply troubling about President Bush’s relationship to reason, about his disdain for facts, his incuriosity about new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he wrestles with on behalf of the country.

One group mistakenly maligns the president as not being smart enough to have a normal active curiosity about separating fact from myth. A second group seems to be convinced that his personal religious conversion experience was so profound that he relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis. But I disagree with both of those groups and reject both of those cartoon images. I know President Bush is plenty smart, and while I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine, and it’s an important motivation for many things that he does in life, as it is for me, and for most of you, I’m convinced that most of the president’s frequent departures from fact based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible. And it is crucially important to be precise in describing exactly what it is he believes in so strongly, and then insulates from any logical challenge or even debate. It is ideology, and not his religious faith that is the source of this troubling inflexibility.

Most of the problems President Bush has caused for this country stemmed not from his belief in God but his belief in the infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology that exalts the interest of the wealthy, and of large corporations over and above the interests of the American people. It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency.

Good stuff.

Good News Bad News

Good News: The US Supreme Court told Tom Delay today that his redistricting scheme in Texas need to be reconsidered.

Bad News: By not summarily affirming the lower court’s ruling and issuing their ruling two weeks before an election, chaos ensues.

Religion and Reality in the White House

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.