Glenn Greenwald uses the following to justify his belief in George W. Bush’s religious sincerity.
By all accounts — including his own — George Bush had a severe addiction to alcohol for many years. Yet he was able, suddenly and with great resolution, to conquer his alcoholism and give up drinking entirely. At the same time, he transformed his life quite fundamentally — from a carousing drunken hedonist into someone who, again by all accounts, began attending church very frequently and focusing on his businesses and career (usually with very little success, but his priorities nonetheless clearly changed).
Greenwald goes on to discuss the importance of accepting a higher power in any recovery program. In other words, Bush could not have successfully kicked his alcohol habit without some kind of genuine religious conversion. I’ll leave that argument to medical doctors and psychiatrists. I find it to be dubious.
George W. Bush straitened himself out in 1986, right at the time that his father made the final decision to run for president. What was Dubya’s role in his father’s campaign?
Though George W. Bush had no official title on the campaign staff, he was his father’s most trusted confidant and a major point of contact for his colleagues. He also became known as a talented speaker and as the campaign’s chief liaison to Christian conservatives.
That’s strange. The man had only found the Methodist version of God the year before. After his father’s election to the White House, Dubya moved back to Texas and made a killing with the Texas Rangers.
Not long thereafter he and Karl Rove set their sights on the governor’s mansion. Bush needed to scrub his history of carousing, drug use, and avoiding military service requirements. Enter the myth of the born-again story. Here he repeats it in a 1999 interview.
Why did you quit drinking?
A couple of things happened. One, you know, the Billy Graham visit in 1985. I met with Billy, but it’s like a mustard seed. You know, he planted a seed in my heart and I began to change. . . . I realized that alcohol was beginning to crowd out my energies and could crowd, eventually, my affections for other people.
Yes, sometimes I would go to a party and drink too much. No, I would not drink too much on a daily basis. I never drank during the day.
You quit drinking and you became more spiritual. Talk about that a little bit.
To put it in spiritual terms, I accepted Christ. What influenced me was the spirituality, sure, which led me to believe that if you change your heart, you can change your behavior. There’s a lot of drug rehabilitation programs and some that are based upon exactly what I went through, which is spiritually based – that’s what AA is really based upon.
You think Karl Rove or Karen Hughes didn’t write that mustard seed rubbish?
Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field; Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof. (Matthew 13:31-32)
George W. Bush didn’t come up with that by himself. It’s stagecraft. Here is what I think.
Bush had a midlife crisis in 1986. His father was concerned that he would damage his election prospects. His wife was sick of his crap. He needed to get his head in order and act like a grown-up. Save his marriage and not screw up his Daddy’s big shot. He may have decided to do some bible study as a way of getting his wife off his back. Maybe he got something out of it and it helped him to have a support group that was non-judgmental. Maybe he leaned on this to give him strength. But, far more important, he was assigned the job of making evangelicals comfortable about his father during the 1988 campaign. The evangelicals knew that Poppy had been a latecomer to the pro-life movement. Here’s a little reminder:
1988 Iowa Caucus Results
Robert Dole 40,661 37.4%
Pat Robertson 26,761 24.6%
George Bush 20,194 18.6%
Jack Kemp 12,088 11.1%
Pete DuPont 7,999 7.3%
No preference 739 .7%
Alexander Haig 364 .3%
When Pat Robertson beat the sitting vice-president in Iowa caucuses it was obvious that some aggressive outreach was required. Dubya was the man with that job. And he made many important contacts while he played that role.
Karl Rove tried to parlay those contacts into a 1990 run for governor of Texas.
It was Mr. Rove who tried to convince the then-managing partner of the Texas Rangers to run for governor in 1990, succeeded in 1994 and managed every Bush political campaign since.
Along the way, Mr. Rove developed a divide-and-conquer model of winning campaigns. Instead of consensus politics, Mr. Rove targeted select groups in the GOP base. Each group – Christian conservatives, tax-cutters, suburban security moms – could be motivated by hot-button issues – gay marriage, lower taxes, the looming threat of terrorism.
It wasn’t just targeting Christian conservatives for its own sake, it was essential to convince people that Bush had reformed himself. Bush needed to learn to play a role, and his experience courting and commiserating with evangelicals helped him to know just what to say.
Bush won the 1994 election. In 1998 it came time to create another myth. Bush wanted to run for the White House. It was time to buy a ranch in Crawford, Texas. Bush was going to become a cowboy. George W. Bush is no more of a cowboy than he is a Rockette. But by getting started early, well before the beginning of the campaign, he was able to make that claim. I don’t see Bush’s conversion to evangelicalism as much different from his conversion to clearing brush. Bush’s conversion may have had some utility in his efforts to control his drinking, but it was of far more utility to his father’s campaign and, later, to his own.
Lest Greenwald misinterpret me, I am not doubting Bush’s faith because I think a sincere faith would somehow excuse his behavior. The fact that I doubt his rancher credentials has no bearing on the legitimacy of his policies. His profession of faith, if sincere, would not justify his actions either. In both cases, I suspect an act. It is a very elaborate and sustained act, no doubt. And it is his ability to carry out these frauds convincingly that leads me to attribute far more native intelligence to Bush than most of his critics are willing to ascribe.
Bush is shallow, uninformed, incurious, and impulsive. You don’t make a decision to launch a war in Iraq without knowing the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite unless you are almost willfully ignorant and grossly negligent. But Bush’s case for war is not simple because his knowledge is limited.
The simplicity of his message is self-conscious. It’s about catapulting the propaganda.
“See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
Bush and Rove know how to con the people. Bush’s persona is mostly an act. He may be genuinely inarticulate, but he is a master of playing a role.
In my opinion, our foreign policy has been framed in a simplistic, dualistic, Manichean way because the Rove team and the neo-conservative team have mastered propaganda. I don’t think Bush is any more genuinely religious than William Kristol or Richard Perle. But they all know how to get the conservative mind to support their imperial policies: faith and fear. They all ran this playbook before…back when we were fighting the godless communists.
I watched the ’88 Republican convention with a bible-thumping, home-schooling family in South Dakota. The mother immediately picked up on George Bush’s passing reference to the goal of world peace and criticized his rejection of apocalyptic prophesy. George Bush had no chance with that family. BTW, they had built their own state-of-the-art house and farm, complete with satellite dish, intercoms, and the latest in milking technology. No hillbillies they.
Bush I was never the real thing to the Christian conservatives. Bush II knew exactly what he’d have to do.
“Greenwald goes on to discuss the importance of accepting a higher power in any recovery program. In other words, Bush could not have successfully kicked his alcohol habit without some kind of genuine religious conversion. I’ll leave that argument to medical doctors and psychiatrists. I find it to be dubious.”
I am with you, and I speak from personal experience.
My mother was a raging alcoholic in the 1980s, as I’ve written at BC. At some point however, I believe in 1985 when I started high school, she abruptly stopped drinking. No AA, no higher power shit, and she didn’t become a Christian or undergo any other religious conversion. She didn’t start drinking again until 1992, when my parents moved to NJ.
I have never asked her WHY she stopped: I suspect it’s because she finally realized that maybe her bad behavior had something to do with my own (getting left back in 7th grade, getting expelled from school in 8th grade, the mohawk and punk rock music, etc…)
Furthermore, i think it’s absolutely clear that Bush STILL drinks. There’s the footage from that wedding. There’s the pretzel incident: I mean come on, “football, pretzels, and fill in the blank”, yknow?
And then there’s his recent trip to the land of pilsner and lager: in the picture you can clearly see a head on the yellow beverage in the pilsner glass. Ginger ale doesn’t retain a head like that, and root beer’s not yellow.
they claim it was a Bruckner’s or whatever they call it.
It’s called Bucklers and it does have a head, but it tastes like crap.
I never thought I’d find myself defending a higher power, but, your Mom’s inner strength notwithstanding, everyone has their own method and if a higher power keeps a drunk off the road then the last thing anyone should do is mock it or denigrate it. And I speak too from personal experience…my own. Not my Mother’s, brother’s or Priest’s. Just so long as you don’t shove your orthodoxy down my throat. Which AA can do. But in the end, if it doesn’t work you can move on and try something different, or do like your Mom did and like i did. Just quit. Problem is that she started again. So did I, after ten years of self control. So who’s to say what’s best for any individual? Not me, that’s for sure.
The page at the link compares the Bush quote to a quote of Joseph Goebbels:
From this you can see that the difference between the Bushies and the Nazis is that the Nazis were up front about their lying, whereas when the Bushies lie, they claim they are telling the truth.
Another difference is that when the Nazis conquered countries, they didn’t claim they were liberating them.
Actually, I don’t see that as a distinction. The Nazis were not up front about their lying. And when they invaded Czechoslovakia they did it to liberate Germans there, same with the Anschluss, and same with the invasion of Poland. All that followed was simply war and required no justification.
Unless you dispute the authenticity of the Goebbels quote, or can find quotes by the Bushies or neocons in which they make reference to their lying, I think that the quote alone is sufficient evidence that the Nazis were more up front about their lying. The closest I know of the neocons being up front about it is when Perle I think said that the WMD thing was essentially just a pretext (he didn’t use that word), something everybody could agree on.
As for the Sudetenland and Austria, those were special cases. The Nazis did not say that they were liberating Poland or Russia; it would be hard for them to have done so, given their racist theory about Slavs. Since at least Woodrow Wilson though, I believe every time America invades someone, it claims it is doing so to bring freedom and democracy etc. to them.
The Nazis despised liberalism, but understood that democracy requires liberalism, so consistently, they despised democracy, too. The Bushies and neocons do everything they can to destroy democracy, but say that that is what they are bringing to the world. Therefore, I cannot see how you can argue that they are not more hypocritical and dishonest than the Nazis.
It’s not just the Bushies and neocons who claim that they are helping the people they are raping. This goes back to the Brits, who pretended that their brutal colonialism was bringing civilization to savages.
Actually, they did say that they were liberating Poland. They wanted to get Liepzig back united with Prussia.
Again, that is a special case. Most of the territory the Nazis conquered did not have a substantial German population. Leipzig is not all of Poland. Also, there is nothing necessarily wrong about seeing your restoring the rule of your own people to a region that has recently been ruled by them. Thatcher saw herself as liberating the Falkland Islands.
The Nazis only claimed to be liberating other Germans (or Austrians, which were the same as far as they were concerned). They could only liberate other members of the master race. Whereas the Americans say they liberate everyone, no matter what nationality or “race”, no matter how culturally different.
I don’t understand why you can’t see the difference.
Oh, I see a difference. But I am just clarifying that the Nazis did not say, “All our talking point are total horseshit.” And they didn’t invade Czechoslovakia, Austria, or Poland using bald faced imperial rhetoric. In each case they said they were doing it to liberate oppressed Germans.
There is a difference between a bad habit and a physical addiction. Having the former a person can decide to stop drinking or doing drugs the day they decide they want to do it. Those who become physically addicted, whose brain chemistry made them vulnerable to begin with or whose brain structure was changed permanently by substance abuse really do need a ” one day at a time” program to live with their personal unfillable black hole. Bush drank out of habit. Kicking it took the minimum of effort. He needed to clean up his act for his dad and for his own political ambitions. The religious conversion merely lent an aura of repentance and redemption–perfect credentials for conning religious conservatives.
One thing that has always made me doubt his religious sincerity is his use of the word “Christ.” I come from a long line of christian fundamentalists from Texas, and they seldom use that word. They usually refer to “Jesus” or “Jesus Christ.” It always sounds scripted to me when Dubya uses this language. But just a guess from my experience.
Interesting. I’ve wondered about that because Episcopalians don’t refer to Christ much either. It is, after all, a title and not a name.
he found a higher whatever? Bullshit. He is a god damned drunk.Near beer? Cut the garbage. greenwald wants us to buy into the idea that the chimp is a sincere religious person. OMG (ha!) The only sincere part of the chimp is his sick insane belief that he is the decider!
Well, he can decide this.
And what the hell is going on- it seems that all I see are examples of “Dems” either backing off, caving in or wimping out regarding any moves against the Goopers. I ain’t gonna list them but yall know at least a couple.
So, hers what I am going to do– attack in writing every cgance I get and every thing that the goopers put up. Good Bad or in the middle.If the goopers bring it up, it is not just bad but it is a joke.
I agree with you, Boo. Bush seems to me the most “unchristian” man – he’s selfish and shows disrespect for most other people. I suspect he only respects CEO’s like Exxon’s Raymond who made millions upon millions of dollars.
He absolutely shows no morose about anything that has happened – all the Iraqis deaths, all the deaths of our soldiers – all the injuries. He just memorizes words and repeats and repeats and often is inarticulate but cares less that he did or said something “unpresidential.”
Being a president is all a game to him and his only religion is faithful daily exercise, a time in which no one can interrupt him for any reason whatsoever.
In orange.
.
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair will meet Pope Benedict at the Vatican to prepare to convert to Roman Catholicism, British newspapers reported.
See my diary.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."