The true cult of George W. Bush

Chris Floyd has an essay on the cult of Bush believers, and it will curl your hair.

.. the dogma of the Bush Cult is identical with the “reality-creating” declaration of Mao’s Little Red Book: “It is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever.” For Bush, as for Mao in the all-devouring Great Leap Forward, “discernible reality” has no meaning: political, cultural, economic, scientific truth – even the fundamental processes of nature, even human nature itself – must give way to the faith-statements of ideology, ruthlessly applied by unbending zealots.

Thus the reality-twisting assertions of Bush’s ideologues: The conquered will welcome their killers. The poor will be happy to slave for the rich. The earth can sustain any amount of damage without lasting harm. The loss of rights is essential to liberty. War without end is the only way to peace. Corruption and cronyism lead to universal prosperity. Dissent is evil; dissenters are “with the terrorists.” But God is with the Leader; whatever he does is righteous, even if in the eyes of unbelievers – the “reality-based community” – his acts are criminal: aggressive war that kills thousands of innocent people, widespread torture, secret assassinations, imprisonment without charges or trial, electoral subversion.

Indeed, the doctrine “Gott mit Uns” is the linchpin of the Bush Cult. Tens of millions of Americans have now embraced the Cult’s fusion of Bush’s leadership with Divine Will. As a Bush volunteer in Missouri told Suskind: “I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down…God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time.” God appointed Bush; thus Bush’s acts are Godly. It’s a circular, self-confirming mindset that can’t be penetrated by reason or facts, can’t be shaken by crimes and scandals. That’s why Bush’s core support – comprising almost half of the electorate – stays rock-solid, despite the manifest failures of his administration. It’s based on blind faith, on poisonous fantasy: simple, flattering (“We’re uniquely good, we’re God’s special nation!”), comforting, complete – so unlike the harsh, bewildering, splintered shards of real life.

Read the whole thing if you get a chance. Myself, I just can’t quite believe that this bunch will just give up the reins of power after the 2008 elections. And I am definitely not a conspiracy theorist.

Realities of war

Digby comments on the current flap at The New Republic and in the rightwing blogs about a soldier in Iraq who has provided some reality about life and conduct in our troops.

It isn’t shocking in the least that otherwise decent people could lose that decency during wartime and it certainly doesn’t surprise you that those who already have a light grip on conscience (or sanity) would behave in ways that would make us recoil in horror in our everyday lives. That is not a judgment about soldiers in general. Each one is his own agent and is responsible for his own actions. War doesn’t render morality inoperative. But it does challenge it and in the case of wars that are themselves immoral it challenges it severely.

I hear so much from the right about how they love the troops. But they don’t seem to love the actual human beings who wear the uniform, they love those little GI Joe dolls they played with as children which they could dress up in little costumes and contort into pretzels for their fun and amusement. If they loved the actual troops they wouldn’t require them to be like two dimensional John Waynes, withholding their real experiences and feelings for fear that a virtual armchair lynch mob would come after them.

Thank God Joseph Heller and James Jones and Erich Maria Remarque and countless others aren’t trying to write their books today. They’d be burned as heretics by a bunch of nasty boys and girls who have fetishized “the troops” into a strange form of Boy Band eroticism — that empty, nonthreatening form of masculinity the tweens use to bridge the scary gap between puberty and adolescence. Private Peter Pan reporting for duty.

The real men for them are the civilians on 24 torturing suspected terrorists for an hour each week, keeping the lil’est tough guys safe from harm with hard sadism and easy answers. That’s where this wingnut war is really being fought. With popcorn.

WAR IS FUCKING HELL.