Greenguy's Board - Is Bush barmy?

That's a good article, but there was an even more intense article published yesterday in New York Times Magazine, that said that if Bush is re-elected on Nov 3 a civil war is going to start INSIDE the republican party... because so many republicans are becoming afraid of Bush's faith-based presidency and secretive and obsessive ways.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/ma...d=all&position

(reg required I think)

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Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND

Published: October 17, 2004

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.''
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and tons more, a long article....

Which basically implies that Bush went crazy after the stress of 9/11. Before that he was a phony president who vacationed while his neocon and corporate masters pulled all the strings, but when he had to deal with 9/11 he became obsessed with the idea that he was god's chosen, and that any opposition to him was opposition to god's will.

A hell of an article. It freaked me out, it was so intense.

Another good article was the knight-ridder piece on how it's becoming clear that the administration had NO PLANS AT ALL for the rebuilding of Iraq after the war.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9927782.htm