Not surprisingly, bits of that eye-opening Suskind article are showing up everywhere today, including Kerry's stump speech. The (particularly) arrogant Bush aide quoted in the article has certainly gifted our lexicon; I've seen his "reality-based community" designation dozens of times today - including at the top of Matthew Yglesias' blog. But Jeff Sharlet, of The Revealer has an interesting take. He asks, "is George W. Bush the first magical president of the United States?"

What’s surprising about Suskind’s summary of Bush’s “walk,” to borrow an evangelical term, is how small a role Jesus Christ seems to play in it. God gets a few cameos, but even he’s a supporting player. Front and center, though, is faith.

[snip]

Believing, it seems, is more important to the President than the substance of his belief. Jesus Christ’s particular teachings -- well, those are good, too. But what really matters is that if you believe you can do something, you can.

What Suskind misses, and what Bush’s more orthodox Christian supporters seem to dodge, is that this is not Christian doctrine by any definition. It is, in fact, a key element of the broad, heterodox movement known as New Age religion.

[snip]

Christian fundamentalism, meanwhile, is the child of the Enlightenment, a functionalist view of faith that’s metaphorically “scientific.” It's scripture as read by a cranky engineer who just wants to know how God works. The Bible, for a fundamentalist, isn’t powerful literature demanding our ever-changing discernment; it’s an instruction manual.

But Bush, we’re told time and again by supporters and detractors, is not a details man. Not much of a reader, either. He is a “heart” man, as pollster John Zogby’s Wizard of Oz characterization of the candidates would have it (Kerry the Tin Man, all brains and no heart, vs. Bush the Scarecrow, nothing but heart and straw).

[snip]

In this particular sense, Bush does seem to be a descendent of the Enlightenment: He’s Rousseau’s noble savage, operating on the pure, animal instincts that’re true because they are, and are because they’re true. The noble savage does not live in what Bush’s aide contemptuously calls “the reality-based community”; he is in and is of a “nature” more real than reality, which, in an unexpected nod to postmodernism, Bush believers seem to dismiss as a social construct.

[snip]

Suskind reads McKinnon's comment (mizm note: referring to ‘When you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what [Bush supporters] don’t like? They don’t like you!’) as an attack on snobbery; in fact, it’s an angry defense of positive thinking, of creating one’s own reality. Bush believers long for absolutes, but they don't care about empirical definitions. They're not literalists, which means they're not Christian fundamentalists. They don't trust language, which is why they read clunky, soulless translations of scripture, when they read it at all. Bush himself doesn't study the Bible; he samples phrases and invokes them like spells.

[snip]

Bush feels. The press, so far, does not. In grappling with Bush’s presidency, it has expanded its range, developed a more nuanced understanding of traditional Christian fundamentalism, recognized liberal evangelicalism, and acknowledged the limitations of Enlightenment thinking. But it still can’t account for the kind of magic that says, If you believe you can do something -- become president despite losing the popular vote, launch a war without evidence, and maybe, if you REALLY believe, get re-elected anyway -- you can.

Matthew Yglesias today:

Suskind's article along with other pieces of evidence of what one might call the creeping Putinization of American life (the Sinclair incident, the threatening letter to Rock The Vote, the specter of the top official in the House of Representatives making totally baseless charges of criminal conduct against a major financier of the political opposition [shades of Mikhail Khodorovsky], the increasing evidence that the 'terror alert' system is nothing more than a political prop, the 'torture memo' asserting that the president is above the law, the imposition of rigid discipline on the congress, the abuse of the conference committee procedure, the ability of the administration to lie to congress without penalty, the exclusion of non-supporters from Bush's public appearances, etc.) are beginning to make me think this assessment may have been misguided. Terrorist forces operating in and around Chechnya have done some horrible things -- I was in Moscow for the big apartment bombings -- but ultimately the most harmful thing they have done was to enable Putin to tighten his grip on power.

This Knight-Ridder piece begins:

In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration's plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners' parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material - and for good reason.

The slide said: "To Be Provided."

A Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

(via Kevin Drum, who notes fittingly "Reality based community indeed.")

Well, this must be causing fits of apoplexy --
amongst those white evangelical and ultra-conservative Christians who call it
"sacrilege" when Kerry quotes the Bible. Now we can't shut him up!

Please tell me --
What kind of "Christian" faith teaches that God hates anyone? And why don't the Bushies condemn such talk? (And why haven't Dems done a better job of pairing Phelps with the brand of faith that Bush professes?)

Rove Watch --
There's a bunch of fun stuff in Dan Froomkins round-up today, not least of which is speculation on what Karl Rove has planned for us in the coming two weeks - Osama bin laden? A cave full of wMD? Plus interesting observations on campaign strategies (Vice President Cheney's face and biography was deliberately excluded from Oregon Voter's Pamphlet mailed out this week; he must be dragging Bush down in the polls there?)

I hate paying attention to polls --
but this is interesting.

Maybe you really can't go home again --
Is Ohio becoming the next "Kansas?" Angry evangelical congregations on the rise, the most draconian Marriage Protection act in the country (if passed, it will force cities and universities to stop offering domestic partner benefits), ever more rabid attacks on the teaching of evolution in schools... Choke down this excerpt from the Salon piece on Ohio's marriage initiative:

"Preaching like a street-corner revivalist, Johnston musters quotes from both the Bible and Dostoevski to make the tautological argument that those who reject his vision of Christianity lack the foundation to make any moral arguments. "The proof for the Christian ethic which condemns homosexual marriage is the impossibility of the contrary," he says. "Reject the Christian ethic and you have no basis for making moral judgments."

The audience stares at him in open-mouthed amazement. Looking like she's been slapped, McClellan walks out of the room and starts crying. "My father was a D-Day lander and a World War II hero," she says later. "He freed two concentration camps. All I could think of was here are all of these people who have fought and given their lives to keep our country free of maniacal people like that guy. This guy reminded me of a Hitler youth. At this stage of our evolution, why is there such a maniacal hatred of people?"

Had she checked out Johnston's Web site, she wouldn't have been so shocked. Unlike national religious right leaders, Johnston isn't coy about his agenda. He publishes poems like "America's Final Crisis," which prophesies that, unless the country adopts biblical law, "You'll be governed by queers and whores" and tyrannized with a "U.N. branded sword." In case that's not clear enough, he also offers a tract titled, "Convincing Reasons HOMOSEXUALS are HELLBOUND!"

During a question-and-answer period, someone says they'd once heard Johnston call for the execution of gays and lesbians. He vigorously denies the charge. Later, he tells me that the decision to put gays to death is a matter best left up to the states. "If we ever had a nation sufficiently Christian" to make homosexuality illegal, he says, imposing capital punishment for homosexuality would be a subject for "an in-house debate. There were capital crimes in the Bible, and that would be
something debated."