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Who’s His Daddy?

Bush famously told Bob Woodward that when it came to going to war with Iraq he didn't ask his biological father, who had gone to war with Iraq, for advice. He talked to a Higher Father instead.

In Bush's faith-based presidency, the formulation is simple: Bush believes in God, God believes in him, and therefore we should, like God, also believe in Bush. Doubters of the Preacher-in-Chief risk the fires of hell, according to Dick Cheney, in the form of another terrorist attack.

As if this weren't frightening enough, it appears Bush may be talking to the wrong Higher Father. "The Lord told me Iraq was going to be (a) a disaster, and (b) messy," Pat Robertson told Paula Zahn on CNN. But when the evangelical leader passed on the divine warning to Bush, the president's response was: "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."

Katrina vanden Heuvel

October 25, 2004

Bush famously told Bob Woodward that when it came to going to war with Iraq he didn’t ask his biological father, who had gone to war with Iraq, for advice. He talked to a Higher Father instead.

In Bush’s faith-based presidency, the formulation is simple: Bush believes in God, God believes in him, and therefore we should, like God, also believe in Bush. Doubters of the Preacher-in-Chief risk the fires of hell, according to Dick Cheney, in the form of another terrorist attack.

As if this weren’t frightening enough, it appears Bush may be talking to the wrong Higher Father. “The Lord told me Iraq was going to be (a) a disaster, and (b) messy,” Pat Robertson told Paula Zahn on CNN. But when the evangelical leader passed on the divine warning to Bush, the president’s response was: “Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties.”

The White House has denied Robertson’s assertion, but Jay Garner, Bush’s first civil administrator of Iraq, told the New York Times that the Administration had planned to withdraw troops from the country just 60 days after taking Baghdad, failing to anticipate the insurgency which has led to more than one thousand American casualties to date.

Bush isn’t divinely inspired; he’s delusional, drunk with self-confidence. Robertson, who is a rabid supporter mind you, described Bush as being “like a contented Christian with four aces. He was just sitting there, like, I’m on top of the world.”

Let us pray that on November 2nd John Kerry, a devout denizen of Red Sox Nation, teaches George Bush what Boston recently taught Yankee fans–pride goeth before the fall.

Katrina vanden HeuvelTwitterKatrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of The Nation, America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture. She served as editor of the magazine from 1995 to 2019.


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