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"Our president is a born again Christian. He does not smoke or drink or womanize. He follows the wisdom of Franklin by going to bed at none p.m. and getting up to read good books like Shakespeare. Of course, he is human. It was imprudent to rush to war with Iraq, but isn't everyone entitled to make an occasional mistake? Doesn't his sound policies on abortion, same sex marriage, stem cell research outweigh any shortcomings?" Yes, Bush is a human. But everything else is spin and speculation. We don't know for sure if he is a Christian and that he doesn't smoke, drink, or womanize. If he is a Christian, he must belong to a kind of Christianity that allows serial dishonesty and the taking of human life with impunity. Bush projects an image of a hale-fellow-well-met buddy that you would like sitting next to you while watching a NASCAR race. Bush's twisted syntax is perhaps part of the act, a way of poking his fingers into the east-coast egg heads. But, sometimes, I think the man has a brain injury, as suggested in his comment to reporters in Gulfport, Mississippi on August 28, 2006: "And I suspect that what you'll see, Toby, is there will be a momentum, momentum will be gathered. Houses will begat jobs, jobs will begat houses." Parse that if you can. Frankly, I've now come to the point where I filter out everything he and his lackies say. I see his lips move, but his words no longer reach me. The gap between reality and rhetoric is just too much for me to take anything he says seriously. Lately, the White House is trying to re-invent him as an intellectual, someone who likes to dip into the sonnets of Shakespeare and the existentialism of Camus. I don't believe any of it, and nor does it matter. I only ask of my president what I ask of my doctor-- that he tells me the truth and that he is competent. Bush has a good education and is in fact the very flower of the Ivy League. But he seems to lack the wisdom, values, and perspective that usually comes with such an education. The Iraq war is not just a mistake, but a monumental act of arrogance that has sent thousands of Americans to their deaths while at the same time eroding our ability to deal with real threats that may emerge from North Korea, Iran, and elsewhere. Bush's policies on abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage and the like is part of the charade-- pretending that he is a conservative while promoting a liberal-- no, a radical agenda-- on other more fundamental policy questions. Bush is akin to Woodrow Wilson for his utopian save the world for democracy vision, akin to Franklin Roosevelt for his massive expansion of the Federal Government with his oceans of red ink and intrusion into local government and individual lives, akin to Lyndon Johnson with his credibility gap and a foreign quagmire that he will punt into another administration, and akin to Clinton for his so-called comprehensive immigration policy and eagerness to export middle class jobs to India. I don't know why Bush calls himself a conservative and furthermore I don't understand why conservatives support him. I voted for Ronald Reagan. And, in my opinion, George Bush is no Ronald Reagan. |