Category: Politics

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.

The Bush Bulge

I really try to avoid the “tinfoil hat” stuff out there in Internet-land. But after 3 debates’ worth of snapshots of the weird wrinkle on Bush’s back, I really have to ask, what IS that thing?

I suspect it’s a flak vest of some sort and the Secret Service won’t let anyone confirm it … but who knows?

Snapshot of the final debate

Wasn’t really inspired to blog much about the last debate.

One comment though — I think the most telling moment of the debate was when Bush was asked about what he would say to a person whose job had been sent overseas. His response? To talk about “No Child Left Behind”. Again. As if the testing of grade school children has any bearing at all on the predicament an adult who is out of work today.

As if he eventually realized that the quality of public school education was not really appropriate as an answer, he belatedly mentionted that there is trade adjustment assistance money available to help people whose jobs have gone away retrain for new jobs.

Interesting, I though, I’ll have to check into that. One quick Google later, I find that even the Heritage Foundation — hardly a bastion of liberalism — calls the TAA program inadequate and flawed.

Typical.

Election Night getting closer

Last night, a classmate noted to our Statistics teacher that there’s a class on Election Night, and would he consider cancelling class. Unfortunately the teacher refused, so now I get to decide whether to cut class or be incommunicado from roughly 5PM to 11PM PST that night.

I think it’s very much up in the air whether we’ll know who wins on Election Night or not. Given the rumblings in Ohio, Florida, Nevada, and elsewhere, it may well be that the morning after Election Day we’ll see a tidal wave of lawsuits and accusations, and will not know who won for weeks. Again.

On the other hand, the poll numbers are starting to shift in Kerry’s favor. It could happen that a Kerry win will be of sufficent numbers to make it clear that despite any shenanigans, real or attempted, Kerry’s victory will be secure. I well remember how happy and relieved I felt in 1992 when Clinton won. If something similar happens again I want to be there for it in real time.

Or God forbid, the reverse could happen. In which case I will have to drink myself into oblivion for a while and then start trying to figure out how to survive the next 4 years.

Either way, I think I want to be at home, or with friends, watching the events unfold.

Sorry, Professor.

Welcome to Planet Republican

I try to avoid the tit-for-tat aspects of politics but this one is so indicative of the dreamland you have to be living in to believe the right-wing spin, and so personally offensive, I had to mention it:

Sinclair vice president Mark Hyman just said on CNN that Kerry and the Democrats are like “holocaust deniers” and that if the Sinclair stunt is an “in-kind donation to George Bush” then “every suicide bomb that goes off in Iraq is an in-kind donation to John Kerry.”

Presumably this was just down from on-air within the last hour. So I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the quotes. But a quite look at this morning’s Post shows that yesterday Hyman said “the networks are acting like Holocaust deniers” for not showing the POWs’ story. So I think there’s every reason to believe that the quotes are accurate.

Per a Kos diary and Josh Marshall.