Jeff Sharlet interprets Bush’s religion not as orthodox Evangelicism, but more like one of those PoMo spiritual melanges, made up of a little Jesus and a little New Age magic. Sharlet particularly notes the extent to which Bush and his team are absolutely certain they can achieve anything they want just by believing hard enough that it can and should be done:

“Bush believers long for absolutes, but they don’t care about empirical definitions. They’re not literalists, in the sense that they don’t cling to language. In fact, they don’t trust language, which is why they read clunky, soulless translations of scripture, when they read it at all. The Community Bible Study approach to biblical education through which Bush found his faith is not based on intense reading, but on personal meditations built around a sentence or two. Bush himself doesn’t study the Bible; he samples phrases and invokes them like spells….When he speaks of ‘wonderworking power’ (a reference to the gospel standard “Power in the Blood”), as he did in his now infamous ‘mission accomplished’ speech, he is drawing that power into being, to make his desires into reality. Politics, strategy, books, the Bible — everything falls away in the realm of magical realism.”

Suddenly, a lot of aspects of these past four years begin to make sense.

For I’ve been studying New Age thought factions on an amateur, part-time basis for the past almost-year. I’ve listened to, read, and in a couple of cases interviewed people who promote versions of the positive-thinking mantra. Some versions are more spiritual than others. Some versions are more individualistic and materialistic than others.

The British seminar leader and hypnotherapist Paul McKenna, loves to rhetorically ask his audiences, “What would you do if you absolutely KNEW you couldn’t fail?” Meanwhile, local ex-ad copywriter Rebecca Fine promotes “The Science of Getting Rich,” a “Certain Way” towards personal wealth, based on the teachings of 1900s pamphleteer Wallace Wattles. (To Fine, “certain” means both specificity and doubtlessness.) Follow the program, Fine says, and the dough will flow your way.

There are a few catches in Wattles’s plan. He didn’t like charity, antitrust actions, or organized labor; instead of forming schemes to redistribute wealth, he wrote that concerned citizens should help the poor learn to generate their own wealth. And you have to really believe you’re channelling the flow of material energy your way. As Fine writes: “Wattles says that instead of questioning how these principles work, you’ll need simply to accept them and begin to practice them.”

This ties in well with Bush’s famous refusals to admit ever having made a mistake. Christianity is big on self-doubt and self-denial; “not my will but thine be done.” But in the positive-thinking realm, doubting yourself’s about the worst sin you can make.

So: Bush isn’t really a Bible thumper; though he’ll gladly seek Bible-thumpers’ votes. He’s really one of the globalization-era spiritual fusionists. He’s part of the target market for Wayne Dyer pledge-drive books and Successories motivational posters. He could be a leader of “no money down” seminars. The Force is with him (albeit, in my opinion, it’s the Dark Side).

I imagine some voters have interpreted this insistant attitude, which scoffers such as myself have derided as “hubris,” as just the sort of can-do mindset they want in a leader. Top-heavy tax cuts WILL stimulate the economy! Iraq and Afghanistan WILL become stable democracies! Abstinance-only education WILL eliminate unwanted pregnancies! Privatization WILL make Social Security more solvent! Why? Because WE SAY SO, that’s why!

But I, for one, still belong to the skeptics (or, as a Bush aide quoted in the NY Times derided us, “the reality-based community”). I believe an acid-tripper, no matter how devoutly he believes he can fly, should be led away from the temptation of an open fifth-floor window. I believe the most assertive, positive-thinking management wasn’t enough to keep certain dot-com ventures alive.

And I believe corporate cronyism is neither good for government nor for business.

I believe no one country should, or even can, unilaterally impose military conquest and shock-therapy economics across the globe.

I believe marriage is not profaned but enhanced by being expanded to more possibilities.

I believe one-sided “news” coverage is not “fair and balanced.”

I believe freedom is not slavery. I believe war is not peace. I believe ignorance is not strength.

And I firmly, positively, believe we can do better.

…have been this on-the-bean during his own campaign?

…calling himself “South Knox Bubba” has compiled a comprehensively scary list of Bush’s major blunders, dirty tricks, and acts of corruption.

…why Bush has become progressively less lucid in public over the years.

…to expect the worst, dirty-tricks-wise, from Bush campaign czar Karl Rove in these last two weeks.

Conservative columnist Charley Reese asks us to “Vote for a Man, Not a Puppet”:

“I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory….It is not at all conservative to balloon government spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and trade deficits don’t matter, and that people should not know what their government is doing. Bush is the most prone-to-classify, the most secretive president in the 20th century. His administration leans dangerously toward the authoritarian….

I will swallow a lot of petty policy differences with Kerry to get a man in the White House with brains enough not to blow up the world and us with it.”

…“Eight Talking Points for Voter Persuasion.” #2: “The President should speak foreign languages. He should also speak English.” #8: “There is not a terrorist hiding in your garage.”

…about the fairness of comparing certain politicians to fascists, Lawrence W. Britt at Free Inquiry has a handy list of 14 common characteristics of fascist regimes. Among them: “Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism,” “disdain for the importance of human rights,” “identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause,” “avid militarism,” “rampant sexism,” “obsession with national security,” “religion and ruling elite tied together,” and “disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.”

…sees links between the flu-shot shortage and Dick Cheney’s now-forgotten drive to make us afraid of Saddam’s supposed smallpox threat.

…the probable reasoning behind the Bushies’ made-up anger over Kerry’s innocuous reference to Mary Cheney’s lesbianism:

“…The ensuing fake controversy is the GOP’s 2004 campaign in nutshell: Don’t let’s talk about Bush’s dismal record. Let’s talk well-spun trivia — or flat-out smears — instead.And when it comes to sensitive treatment of gays and families of gays, no one can match the record of Republicans — for wallowing so deep in the gutter of bigotry that they definitively make life quantifiably worse for gays, lesbians, and their families.”

…the PBS doc The Choice 2004 in its entirety online.

And on Friday, for our readers in the north, CBC’s Newsworld cable channel (alas, not the main, viewable-on-Seattle-cable CBC channel) is rerunning the French doc The World According to Bush, depicting the prez and his family as “one of inconceivable family secrets, painstakingly concealed.”

…to my previous response to his “Democrats for Bush” blog (see an entry or two below):

“Clark,Thanks for your thoughtful note; I am indeed a Democrat because I say I am and because I have never voted Republican in my life. In earlier posts in the blog I set out to offer Kerry some campaign advice but I realized no Kerry people were interested in anything I might say. What monster on the Kerry campaign decided to run Vietnam as as a rallying point? That was sheer madness. Why run Kerry at all? The guy is a strange combination of patrician and cipher. I have no idea what the Dems want. OK cut the tax cuts for the rich, yawn. The war on terror is the big issue, the right issue, and the Dems did not get that until very late in the game.

I really want to ask you what you mean when you talk about the neocon machine and their responsibility for the world as it is – or 2/3 of it. I don’t get that at all. Near as I can tell there is no machine running anything in human affairs. I do know that we are in a fight for our survival and politico killer Muslims want to take us down. What’s this machine your talking about? More than anyone I always thought of you as someone who values the particulars of the human community of free people just doing whatever the hell they want independent of fads and social pressure. Everything you’re for the Islamo killers are against. Anyway, I’m glad you didn’t cut me off completely; hope we can keep talking….

Doug”

1. Yes, Virginia, there is a neoconservative political faction, and yes, it’s got a hold on the White House, the Supreme Court, both houses of Congress, vast swaths of the “news” media, major segments of corporate America, and some well-funded think tanks and lobbying groups. While its dispersed sects and factions don’t always operate in sync with one another, it generally moves in a well-directed path, led by the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife, Ralph Reed, the oil and mining lobbies, and their ilk.

2. The phrasing of “Islamo killers” is just the sort of “Other”-bashing jingoism we used to hear during the anti-Commie days, and for the same rhetorical purpose: To keep us cowered in fear of a dehumanized enemy, willing to abandon all independent thought and obediently submit to our own national rulers.

3. Yes, there are terrorist gangs out there, who’d like to do horrible things to Americans (and to Israelis, and to Canadians and Europeans, and to rival Islamic factions, etc.). The Bush crew has utterly failed to stem this threat, and has even made it worse by giving this previously stateless bunch a whole country (the non-Green Zone Iraq) to play in.

4. But there are also additional threats to American democracy, to our well-being, and to our personal freedoms. Among these: An economic “recovery” that hasn’t happened for hardly anybody except the CEO class; the ongoing attempts to turn a particularly hate-based fundamentalism into America’s state religion; the bungled Iraq occupation; the outsourcing of the legislative process to the zillionaires’ lobbyists; the homeland war against civil liberties; the backward pace of environmental protection, and our deteriorating reputation in the rest of the world, even among our own allies.

The Bush team has done nothing substantial to effectively ease these non-terrorist threats, and has intentionally worked to worsen many of them.

5. You bet I’m for a free world and a free people. That’s why I support Kerry. Even on the single issue of terror, he’d do better than Bush.

…concerning the sexual harassment suit placed against Bill O’Reilly by a disgruntled female staffer. The charges, if true, are despicable; but, as we’ve all seen, such behavior is too sadly common among egotistical powermongers of assorted ideological persuasions.

However, I was intrigued by a remark by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (what the hell is this guy with at least two thirds of a brain still doing on a channel that’s actively vying to become more dumbed-down than Fox?). Olbermann compared O’Reilly to one Boake Carter, a controversial ’30s radio commentator totally forgotten today (except for one quotation—”In the time of war the first casualty is truth”).

Boake Carter’s life story, as told by Olbermann and confirmed by a quick net search, has little in common with O’Reilly’s. But it’s still fascinating.

In the early years of network radio, Carter had risen from a local reporter in Philadelphia to a network “editorialist.” By 1932 he had a regular 15-minute opinion show, in which he lectured on the events of the day. As the ’30s depressingly wore on, Carter’s ideology apparently became more stridently anti-Semitic, anti-FDR, anti-liberal, etc. In 1938 his sponsor chose not to renew his contract.

It took a year for him to find another home, on Mutual (the WB of radio networks). On his new show he was pro-Roosevelt and pro-Jewish. He even announced his allegiance to a “Biblical Hebrewism” sect, the Society of the Bible in the Hands of its Creators. But that turned out to be a personality cult of the basest kind. Carter lost his professional reputation, wife, home, and fortune to the cult’s leader. By the time Carter died in 1944, he’d already become a has-been.

…Bush’s continued election viability to his appeal to “our lizard brains,” manipulating the populace into a pre-rational state that leaves us “shrouded in the fog of fear.”

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I’d never find an intelligent Bush defender, none other than print Misc contributor Doug Anderson shows up to assume the role. He has a blog called “Democrats for Bush,” and contributed an op-ed essay in the P-I last week.

Anderson’s essay takes the familiar neo-conservative tack of attributing all manner of illogical mania to unquoted, unnamed left-wingers (in particular, comparing Republicans to Nazis), implying that Bush’s opponents as a whole share such traits. I happen to disagree with just about everything in it after the first three paragraphs. But it’s well paced, well drafted, and even well argued—qualities I have seldom seen in any pro-Bush material.

I personally see Bush as an inept figurehead (that is, inept at the job of figurehead) for the neocon political machine. The neocon machine has several important cultural differences from the old National Socialist machine, but also several tactical similarities (particularly in invoking the politics of fear and bigotry, a kitsch aesthetic, and a highly authoritarian “populism”).

I have yet to read or hear anything in favor of Bush’s re-election that even attempts to appeal to the mindset of those of us who are neither Limbaugh fans nor billionaires. Alas, I didn’t find it in Anderson’s P-I entry either; just more lucid versions of the same old pinko-bashing you’ll find on certain radio stations and cable channels.

What British conservative pundits used to call “the loony left” has nothing to do with the real issues of this campaign. The radicals don’t even like Kerry, and Kerry’s distanced himself from them. Extreme left-wingers would have little or no sway in a Kerry administration. Extreme right-wingers effectively run the Bush administration, and are taking it and the rest of us into the proverbial toilet.

Yes, I believe we live in a dangerous world. I also believe the neocon machine is responsible for at least two thirds of those dangers, and has proven incapable of effectively responding to the rest.

On the happy side, in Anderson I’ve finally found someone with whom I can intelligently debate these topics.