It's been a week or two since Ron Suskind's terrific NY Times Magazine article came out, but I just got around to reading it. To say the article greatly helps to understand this guy in the Oval Office is quite the understatement. If you were not already fearful given the detachment from reality GW displays on a regular basis, Suskind truly crystallizes just how off the charts things are when it comes to blurring governmental policy and religion.

Here's the opening line in the article:

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."

In prior posts, I've mentioned the likelihood of this occurring and in a sense, it would be a long overdue good thing. It's about the ONLY thing good that could come out of a GW win -- intra-GOP fighting.

Bartlett is a "self-described libertarian Republican" so it's very difficult for the right-wing folks to attempt their usual dismissal due to liberal bias (what's become a proverbial red herring). He is rightfully disturbed by "this instinct he's (Bush) always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' And ''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.... 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.... But you can't run the world on faith.''

Exactly. Bartlett really nails it, esp. the part about GW being "just like them." Al Qaeda & Osama are just as nutty as Bush's administration with both camps driven by staunch, resolute theological beliefs. Each side believes God is on their side -- it's lunacy! It's just as crazy as when sports figures thank God for an achievement, but such an act assumes God didn't care as much about the other competing athletes. Does this really make sense? Isn't God supposed to be all-loving? Would he/she truly pick sides??