The Passion of the Bush or Dubya and the Religious Right

[CurtainUp2]

Posted: 10/6/04 at 7:49pm

Scary stuff!

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/arts/03rich.html?oref=login

Updated On: 10/6/04 at 07:49 PM

[DottieD'Luscia]

Posted: 10/6/04 at 8:05pm

You're right; very scary!!!

[Rose_MacShane]

Posted: 10/6/04 at 8:09pm

Good Lord, that's frightening.

[Princess MimiChica]

Posted: 10/6/04 at 8:25pm

screw it, i'm not registering to read a stupid article that's probably just more useless Liberal lies =P

[shesings]

Posted: 10/6/04 at 8:28pm

throw that "liberal" in again. As if you're calling someone the devil or something. Liberal, being tolerant of others, when that became a bad thing I'll never know, nor understand. It is a sad sad state of affairs for our country however.

[Plum]

Posted: 10/6/04 at 8:44pm

That was a Fringe musical that was far too kind to the President, I think.

[CurtainUp2]

Posted: 10/6/04 at 11:03pm

screw it, i'm not registering to read a stupid article that's probably just more useless Liberal lies =P - Princess Mimichica

Then allow me to reproduce the article for you Princess.

October 3, 2004
FRANK RICH
Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush

You can run but you can't hide: Oct. 5 will bring the perfect storm in this year's culture wars. It's on that strategically chosen date, four Tuesdays before the election, that the DVD of "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be released along with not one but two new Michael Moore books. It's also the release date of the equally self-effacing Ann Coulter's latest rant, of a new DVD documentary, "Horns and Halos," that revisits the Bush mystery year of 1972, and of an R.E.M. album, "Around the Sun," that gets in its own political licks at the state of the nation.

When Dick Cheney and John Edwards debate in Cleveland that night, Bruce Springsteen will be barnstorming in another swing state, as the Vote for Change tour hits St. Paul. All that's needed to make the day complete is a smackdown between Kinky Friedman and Teresa Heinz Kerry on "Imus in the Morning."

Of the many cultural grenades being tossed that day, though, the one must-see is "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House," a DVD that is being specifically marketed in "head to head" partisan opposition to "Fahrenheit 9/11." This documentary first surfaced at the Republican convention in New York, where it was previewed in tandem with an invitation-only, no-press-allowed "Family, Faith and Freedom Rally," a Ralph Reed-Sam Brownback jamboree thrown by the Bush campaign for Christian conservatives. Though you can buy the DVD for $14.95, its makers told the right-wing news service WorldNetDaily.com that they plan to distribute 300,000 copies to America's churches. And no wonder. This movie aspires to be "The Passion of the Bush," and it succeeds.

More than any other campaign artifact, it clarifies the hard-knuckles rationale of the president's vote-for-me-or-face-Armageddon re-election message. It transforms the president that the Democrats deride as a "fortunate son" of privilege into a prodigal son with the "moral clarity of an old-fashioned biblical prophet." Its Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but God's essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth. The stations of his cross are burnished into cinematic fable: the misspent youth, the hard drinking (a thirst that came from "a throat full of Texas dust"), the fateful 40th-birthday hangover in Colorado Springs, the walk on the beach with Billy Graham. A towheaded child actor bathed in the golden light of an off-camera halo re-enacts the young George comforting his mom after the death of his sister; it's a parable anticipating the future president's miraculous ability to comfort us all after 9/11. An older Bush impersonator is seen rebuffing a sexual come-on from a fellow Bush-Quayle campaign worker hovering by a Xerox machine in 1988; it's an effort to imbue our born-again savior with retroactive chastity. As for the actual president, he is shown with a flag for a backdrop in a split-screen tableau with Jesus. The message isn't subtle: they were separated at birth.

"Faith in the White House" purports to be the product of "independent research," uncoordinated with the Bush-Cheney campaign. But many of its talking heads are official or unofficial administration associates or sycophants. They include the evangelical leader and presidential confidant Ted Haggard (who is also one of Mel Gibson's most fervent P.R. men) and Deal Hudson, an adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign until August, when he resigned following The National Catholic Reporter's investigation of accusations that he sexually harassed an 18-year-old Fordham student in the 1990's. As for the documentary's "research," a film positioning itself as a scrupulously factual "alternative" to "Fahrenheit 9/11" should not inflate Mr. Bush's early business "success" with Arbusto Energy (an outright bust for most of its investors) or the number of children he's had vaccinated in Iraq ("more than 22 million," the movie claims, in a country whose total population is 25 million).

"Will George W. Bush be allowed to finish the battle against the forces of evil that threaten our very existence?" Such is the portentous question posed at the film's conclusion by its narrator, the religious broadcaster Janet Parshall, beloved by some for her ecumenical generosity in inviting Jews for Jesus onto her radio show during the High Holidays. Anyone who stands in the way of Mr. Bush completing his godly battle, of course, is a heretic. Facts on the ground in Iraq don't matter. Rational arguments mustered in presidential debates don't matter. Logic of any kind is a nonstarter. The president - who after 9/11 called the war on terrorism a "crusade," until protests forced the White House to backpedal - is divine. He may not hear "voices" instructing him on policy, testifies Stephen Mansfield, the author of one of the movie's source texts, "The Faith of George W. Bush," but he does act on "promptings" from God. "I think we went into Iraq not so much because there were weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Mansfield has explained elsewhere, "but because Bush had concluded that Saddam Hussein was an evildoer" in the battle "between good and evil." So why didn't we go into those other countries in the axis of evil, North Korea or Iran? Never mind. To ask such questions is to be against God and "with the terrorists."

The propagandists of "Faith in the White House" argue, as others have, that the president's invocation of religion in the public sphere, from his citation of Jesus as his favorite "political philosopher" to his incessant invocation of the Almighty in talking about how everything is coming up roses in Iraq, is consistent with the civic spirituality practiced by his antecedents, from the founding fathers to Bill Clinton. It's not. Past presidents have rarely, if ever, claimed such godlike infallibility. Mr. Bush never admits to making a mistake; even his premature "Mission Accomplished" victory lap wasn't in error, as he recently told Bill O'Reilly. After all, if you believe "God wants me to be president" - a quote attributed to Mr. Bush by the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention - it's a given that you are incapable of making mistakes. Those who say you have are by definition committing blasphemy. A God-appointed leader even has the power to rewrite His texts. Jim Wallis, the liberal evangelical author, has pointed out Mr. Bush's habit of rejiggering specific scriptural citations so that, say, the light shining into the darkness is no longer God's light but America's and, by inference, the president's own.

It's not just Mr. Bush's self-deification that separates him from the likes of Lincoln, however; it's his chosen fashion of Christianity. The president didn't revive the word "crusade" idly in the fall of 2001. His view of faith as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war against evil is synergistic with the violent poetics of the best-selling "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson's cinematic bloodfest. The majority of Christian Americans may not agree with this apocalyptic worldview, but there's a big market for it. A Newsweek poll shows that 17 percent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. To Karl Rove and company, that 17 percent is otherwise known as "the base."

The pandering to that base has become familiar in countless administration policies, starting with its antipathy to stem-cell research, abortion, condoms for H.I.V. prevention and gay civil rights. But ever since Mr. Bush's genuflection to Bob Jones University threatened to shoo away moderates in 2000, the Rove ruse is to try to keep the most militant and sectarian tactics of the Bush religious program under the radar. (Mr. Rove even tried to deny that the wooden lectern at the Republican convention was a pulpit embedded with a cross, as if a nation of eyewitnesses could all be mistaken.) The re-election juggernaut has not only rounded up the membership rosters of churches en masse but quietly mounted official Web sites like kerrywrongforcatholics.com as well. (Evangelicals and Mormons have their own Web variants on this same theme, but not the Jews, who are apparently getting in Kerry just what they deserve.) Even the contraband C-word is being revived out of sight of most of the press: Marc Racicot, the Bush-Cheney campaign chairman, lobbed a direct-mail fund-raising letter in March describing Mr. Bush as "leading a global crusade against terrorism."

In this spring's classic "South Park" parody, "The Passion of the Jew," in which Mr. Gibson's movie tosses the community into a religious war, one of the kids concludes: "If you want to be Christian, that's cool, but you should focus on what Jesus taught instead of how he got killed. Focusing on how he got killed is what people did in the Dark Ages, and it ends up with really bad results." He has a point. It's far from clear that Mr. Bush's eschatology and his religious vanity are leading to good results now. The all-seeing president who could pronounce Vladimir Putin saintly by looking into his "soul" is now refusing to acknowledge that the reverse may be true. The general in charge of tracking down Osama bin Laden, William G. Boykin, has earned cheers in some quarters for giving speeches at churches proclaiming that Mr. Bush is "in the White House because God put him there" to lead the "army of God" against "a guy named Satan." But all that preaching didn't get his day job done; he hasn't snared the guy named Osama he was supposed to bring back "dead or alive."

"George W. Bush: Faith in the White House" must be seen because it shows how someone like General Boykin can stay in his job even in failure and why Mr. Bush feels divinely entitled to keep his job even as we stand on the cusp of an abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview, faith, or at least a certain brand of it, counts more than competence, and a biblical mission, or at least a simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile of one, counts more than the secular goal of waging an effective, focused battle against an enemy as elusive and cunning as terrorists. That no one in this documentary, including its hero, acknowledges any constitutional boundaries between church and state is hardly a surprise. To them, America is a "Christian nation," period, with no need even for the fig-leaf prefix of "Judeo-."

Far more startling is the inability of a president or his acolytes to acknowledge any boundary that might separate Mr. Bush's flawed actions battling "against the forces of evil" from the righteous dictates of God. What that level of hubris might bring in a second term is left to the imagination, and "Faith in the White House" gives the imagination room to run riot about what a 21st-century crusade might look like in the flesh. A documentary conceived as a rebuke to "Fahrenheit 9/11" is nothing if not its unintentional and considerably more nightmarish sequel.

[Plum]

Posted: 10/6/04 at 11:15pm

Chica doesn't like to actually defend her views; she prefers to repeat accusations from Fox News (liberal lies? *yawn*) then leave.

[CurtainUp2]

Posted: 10/6/04 at 11:19pm

I'd just like for her to read the article and tell me what the "liberal lies" are exactly.

[jrb_actor]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 3:22am

How did Mimi possibly get through RENT and like it????

[Sunfish]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 3:47am

That article articulates exactly why this President and his cabal are so more intensely frightening than the Republicans that I "grew up with". If I were a traditional Republican from those days, I would be really pissed at what has been done to the party by that group!!

[CurtainUp2]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 10:39am

Updated On: 10/7/04 at 10:39 AM

[Princess MimiChica]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 11:37am

Plum, stop being an idiot. I defend my views but you choose not to see the merit in anything I say, so it's like arguing with a brick wall. I'm over it.

jrb, I ADORE RENT because it's a beautiful story with amazing, lovely music. Why do I have to be a Democrat to love the show?

Ok I read the article. Big friggin whoop. It's no different than the stupid Michael Moore propoganda. What exactly was the point of the original post?

[robbiej]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 11:43am

Ya know...even Tucker Carlson is anti-Bush. Said so last night on REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER.

Fascinating that one can be a conservative and recognize that this administration is doing things incorrectly.

Gives one hope.

[mominator]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 11:47am

Tucker said something anti Bush and I missed it? DANG!

[PalJoey]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 12:08pm

Princess Mimi, please read the other Frank Rich article, the one I posted about the debates.

Many people who share your viewpoint are coming to understand that they have been lied to by this administration.

Don't let pride stand in the way of your intelligence.

What you dismiss as "liberal lies" are the voices exposing the lies being told by the president and Dick Cheney.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 12:14pm

I'm sorry, but calling PLUM an idiot is ridiculous, as she has continually proven by her posts that she is anything but. Whereas Princess has shown a definite trend toward posting and running - exactly as PLUM pointed out.

[robbiej]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 12:17pm

Tucker Carlson stated outright that he more than likely will not support W. because of his handling of the Iraq war. He mentioned that his position shifted when no WMD's were found.

[Princess MimiChica]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 12:39pm

WHEN have I ever "posted and ran"??? Even after I JUST reponded to this thread ,i'm still accused of running?? WTF is that about? I just can't win with you guys.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 12:44pm

Princess - There have been other times, just not this time perhaps.

[jrb_actor]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 2:03pm

I don't give a crap about democratic/republican. I'm talking how could you have enjoyed RENT so much when it is a liberal love song??

[InTheMoney]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 3:23pm

"God's essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth"

And so were the Crusaders during the bloodiest & most horrific wars of the Middle Ages.

The Crusades were started by a Pope calling for "God's essential and irreplaceable warrior(s) on Earth" and John Paul II has just apologised for the deeds committed in the name of Christianity.

Ok, both sides were as bad as each other - much as they are now - but that sort of fanaticism can only lead to more bloodshed, much of it needless.

There are other parts of this article which I find frighteningly close to the blind faith of the medieval period which led to the death of so many innocents.

"I think we went into Iraq not so much because there were weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Mansfield has explained elsewhere, "but because Bush had concluded that Saddam Hussein was an evildoer" in the battle "between good and evil." So why didn't we go into those other countries in the axis of evil, North Korea or Iran? Never mind. To ask such questions is to be against God and "with the terrorists."

Does that quotation make no-one else think of the witchunts of Salem, and the United Kingdom, the Religious Wars of France, the torture & persecution of Calvinists/Lutherians in Europe?

In all those cases again, to express any sympathy or understanding of the views of the persecuted, to condemn how they were treated, or to question the regime was met with accusations of treason, heresy, witchcraft. Aside from this article, I have heard much from Bush which leads me to hear the echoes of it now.

Fanatacism is a bad thing in ANY religion - there is NO black and white. Ignore the grey areas and you can, and will, bring far greater destruction upon this earth.

ITM

PS: I have nothing against Bush persay, I'd like to make that clear, though I condemn his policy in Israel - Clinton handled it so much better. But he frightens me. He really does.

PPS: As a Brit not understanding quite why you people can't just accept you don't all like the same political party & why it has to be so personal, I also have to ask - when did "liberal" become a bad thing?

[CurtainUp2]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 3:42pm

Ok I read the article. Big friggin whoop. It's no different than the stupid Michael Moore propoganda. What exactly was the point of the original post? - Princess MimiChica

Princess... how exactly is it the same as the "stupid Michael Moore propaganda"? Even if you consider both to be propaganda, do you deny that the Bush administration panders to the religious right? What do you think about a President who constantly steps over the line deviding Church and State? Do you think there should be a separation between Church and State? What are your thoughts on the following statement made in the article?

"That no one in this documentary, including its hero, acknowledges any constitutional boundaries between church and state is hardly a surprise. To them, America is a "Christian nation," period, with no need even for the fig-leaf prefix of "Judeo-."

Michael Moore is not a registered Democrat. In fact, there's some criticism of the Democratic party in Farenheit 9/11. But what do you think about those so closely affiliated with the Bush administration/campaign taken part in the making of this film?

"Faith in the White House" purports to be the product of "independent research," uncoordinated with the Bush-Cheney campaign. But many of its talking heads are official or unofficial administration associates or sycophants. They include the evangelical leader and presidential confidant Ted Haggard (who is also one of Mel Gibson's most fervent P.R. men) and Deal Hudson, an adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign until August, when he resigned following The National Catholic Reporter's investigation of accusations that he sexually harassed an 18-year-old Fordham student in the 1990's".

I asked you to point out what the "liberal lies" were in this article. Well... what are they exactly?

Are you capable of articulating a half-way intelligent opinion beyond accusing every Kerry supporter or Democrat of spreading "more useless lies" and "big friggin whoop"? If not, then perhaps you should avoid threads of a political nature.

Updated On: 10/7/04 at 03:42 PM

[InTheMoney]

Posted: 10/7/04 at 3:46pm

I'm actually rather amused by this concept of it all being "propaganda" and "liberal lies" on account of it supports the Democrats.

Don't tell me you SERIOUSLY think Bush NEVER ever uses propaganda? He NEVER lies? His own Vice-President has as good as admitted the administration (and therefore Bush, for the President is accountable for the actions of his officials) has lied through its teeth over Iraq.

Yes it may be propaganda. But the Republicans aren't exactly free from spin either! Three words: Pot. Kettle. Black.