[Dialogue] Dubya's Christianity

[jim rippey]

Today's AlterNet has a fascinating analysis of how the President's "born again" status explains much.  The title is "Keeping it Simple, Stupid," by Stephen Pizzo.  The full story is at     http://www.alternet.org/story/23183/ 

Below are my excerpts:     Jim Rippey in Bellevue, NE

For those of the evangelical bent, there is always only one true way. This is precisely the mindset we put in the White House when we elected George W. Bush. The press has misinterpreted it, calling Bush's behavior "stubborn." No -- that's not it. He's not "stubborn." Nelson Mandela was stubborn. Winston Churchill, Rev. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Gen. George Patton, Rosa Parks... they were stubborn. George W. Bush is simply "right." And I mean "simply." Maintaining simplicity has been George's salvation. After years of quiet desperation, a rich frat boy, a certifiable putz and a drunk Bush was "saved." Until that moment, life's plethora of choices, conflicting options, moral and personal issues overwhelmed poor young George. Then someone turned him on to Jesus... the one-stop, one-track, one-size-fits-all solution. For young George, the Bible became his life's owner's manual.

..... We see George's evangelical proclivities most clearly in his proselytizing on the glories of democracy to what he views as "heathen regimes" around the world. Undemocratic governments are, to George, the equivalent of unrepentant sinners. They shall be saved. (Resistance is futile; they will be assimilated.) Here we clearly see the "damn the facts" behavior of the evangelical mind. First, when George says another country should become "democratic," he means it the same way he does when he suggests non-believers should become Christians. He doesn't mean they should become Mormons, or that they should join the Greek Orthodox Church. He means they should become Bible thumping, Lord-praising, born-again, like him. Ditto with democracy. George is not interested in hearing about other forms of Christianity, or democracy. There is only one right form of both: his, and his. 

.... Bush gets particularly excited when he talks about Lebanon, which he sees as a born-again democracy candidate. But he also sees Satan at work there in the form of undemocratic Syria. Bush is demanding Syria stop meddling in Lebanon's internal affairs. Iconvenient fact: Even as George Bush lectures Syria on interfering in Lebanon, he commands 200,000 heavily armed US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they are actively trying to remake both countries into his democratic vision. Somehow George sees no contradiction there -- that Syria's behavior constitutes interference, while US policy doesn't. That nuance, he surely believes, is just one of Satan's many traps.