Faith-Based Presidency

Bill Maher: "I'm looking at a headline right now; this is today's Chicago Sun Times. It says -- this is the headline -- Human Activity Is Destroying Planet. That sounds bad to me, 'destroying planet'. And yet, when you look at the polls, the environment does not even make the list of quote 'issues that matter'. It's stuck down there with 'Other'. Gay marriage is ahead of the environment... I don't get it what people don't get about this issue... Who do you blame most? Is it the Republicans for not caring, the Democrats for being lame and not blaming the people who don't care, or the Media for not making it an issue?"

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of Crimes Against Nature, in response:

It's the Media. The Media's primarily at fault. And it really goes back to 1988 when Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine, which gave The Media an obligation to advance the public interest and to serve our democracy in broadcast media. And since that time you've had six large corporations who have taken over virtually all 6000 television stations in this country, almost all 15,000 radio stations, and 80% of the 16,000 newspapers. The news departments have become corporate profit centers, and their only obligation now is to their shareholders, which is to create large audiences and viewerships so they can sell more ad space. So they're airing stories that appeal to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip, and now for terror. So they give us Kobi Bryant, and they give us Michael Jackson, and they give us Laci Peterson, and they give us lots and lots of terror alerts, but they're not telling us the really critical stories that impact our way of life. What President Bush has done over the last three and a half years -- he is the worst environmental president that we've had in American history.

Bill Maher: "Well, actually at the second [presidential] debate he said the quality of the air is cleaner since I've been president, fewer water complaints since I've been president. How does he make that claim?"

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:

It's untrue... two weeks ago the EPA announced that in 19 states it's now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish because of mercury contamination. One out of every six American women now has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases: autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart/liver/kidney disease... I had my own mercury levels tested recently, Bill, and my levels are about three times what are considered safe, just from eating fish. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels of mercury would have children with cognitive impairment -- with permanent brain damage, probably an IQ loss of 5 to 7 points. There's 630,000 children born in this country every year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mothers' wombs... we know where the mercury's coming from, it's coming from 1100 coal burning power plants, an industry that has contributed $100 million to this administration. Under Clinton rules, they would have had to remove 90% of that mercury within 3 and a half years, but this president announced eight weeks ago that he was scrapping those rules, and substituting rules that were written by industry lobbyists, that will require that they never have to clean up. This is an issue that affects hundreds of thousands of people and directly impacts the health of millions and millions of Americans, but you don't see it in the newspaper. It should be in the headlines every single day, but we don't know about it.

Bill Maher: "Well, we're gonna talk a little about it here tonight, and one of the things we want to talk about this week because it was a big story is President Bush's -- what Ron Suskind calls, this week, a Faith-Based Presidency. You mentioned Ronald Reagan. His environmental guy James Watt... one time they asked him... what he thought of sacred places that America was suppose to safeguard, and he said, 'I don't know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.' So in other words, use it or lose it. I know you write about this unholy alliance between the Christian Right and the antienvironmentalists. Tell us a little about that."

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:

There's a Christian heresy that's called Dominion Theology, and James Watt was a proponent of it. Gale Norton also believes in it; she was his protege, and she is now President Bush's Secretary of the Interior. It's ascribed to by many other people who are in positions of power in this administration, and that heresy says that the world is gonna end soon, and that we should use the things that are here. We should not bother preserving them for future generations. And they misread a paragraph from Genesis in which God tells Adam and Eve to go out and establish dominion over the earth. They say that is a biblical mandate that we should destroy the planet.

Bill Maher: "Well, apparently it's worthing, because once again, headline today: Human Activity Destroying Planet. So we're doing God's work."

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:

As I show in my book, there was an alliance between these groups, these kind of paranoid right-wing Christian heretics, and the polluting industry that was created back in the 1970's by Colorado brewer Joseph Coors, who's also the biggest polluter in the state of Colorado. He brought together these groups, to provide foot soldiers for the polluting industry, and in return those kind of right-wing paranoid groups, who had always been on the fringes in American history because they've had a lot of political intensity, but they've never been able to get the other thing that drives political power in our country, which is money. Coors was able to engineer an agreement with them, to provide them huge amounts of money, in exchange for them giving political clout, and political foot soldiers to that industry. They ended up helping Ronald Reagan get elected, with something called the Sagebrush Rebellion... [Joseph's] son Peter Coors is running [for election] in Colorado...

Bill Maher: "Well, they've got those twins... So let me ask you one last question, about your -- I guess he's your cousin-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger. And this is apropos to the environment because the states really, because of this federal government and their environmental policies, the states are having to take the lead, and Arnold is doing a pretty good job. Gas mileage in this state he says has to be higher than it is on the national level, stem cells, pro choice, gay rights. He's to the left of Kerry on a lot of things. He even passed a bill, no sex with dead people. I don't know if that's left or right, but... It seems like what he's doing is, if you say you're a Republican then you can govern like a normal person. And I would say he calls himself a Republican but he acts a lot more like a Kennedy."

* * *

From the Ron Suskind article:

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .

''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''

Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''

Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''

Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''

The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to make sense of the same thing -- a president who has been an extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity and action.

But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect.

The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic ''base'' that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ''you can be certain and be wrong.''

...

One aspect of the Harvard Business School method, with its emphasis on problems of actual corporations, is sometimes referred to as the ''case cracker'' problem. The case studies are static, generally a snapshot of a troubled company, frozen in time; the various ''solutions'' students proffer, and then defend in class against tough questioning, tend to have very short shelf lives. They promote rigidity, inappropriate surety. This is something H.B.S. graduates, most of whom land at large or midsize firms, learn in their first few years in business. They discover, often to their surprise, that the world is dynamic, it flows and changes, often for no good reason. The key is flexibility, rather than sticking to your guns in a debate, and constant reassessment of shifting realities. In short, thoughtful second-guessing.

Comments

[NudeCybot]

Good post, which reminds me, whatever happened to that idea of "separation of church and state" (was that Jefferson?).

Inquiring Canadians want to know.

[Rev. Margaret Moore]

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Then they should know that according to scripture that the anti-Christ is coming... and I think GWB is starting to fall in with that prophesy.