Apocalyptic president
Even some Republicans are now horrified by the influence Bush
has given to the evangelical right
By
Sidney Blumenthal
03/23/06 "The
Guardian" -- -- In his latest PR offensive
President Bush came to Cleveland, Ohio, on Monday to answer the
paramount question on Iraq that he said was on people's minds:
"They wonder what I see that they don't." After mentioning
"terror" 54 times and "victory" five, dismissing "civil war"
twice and asserting that he is "optimistic", he called on a
citizen in the audience, who homed in on the invisible meaning
of recent events in the light of two books, American Theocracy,
by Kevin Phillips, and the book of Revelation. Phillips, the
questioner explained, "makes the point that members of your
administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see
the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the
apocalypse. Do you believe this? And if not, why not?"
Bush's immediate response, as transcribed by CNN, was: "Hmmm."
Then he said: "The answer is I haven't really thought of it that
way. Here's how I think of it. First, I've heard of that, by the
way." The official White House website transcript drops the
strategic comma, and so changes the meaning to: "First I've
heard of that, by the way."
But it is certainly not the first time Bush has heard of the
apocalyptic preoccupation of much of the religious right, having
served as evangelical liaison on his father's 1988 presidential
campaign. The Rev Jerry Falwell told Newsweek how he brought Tim
LaHaye, then an influential rightwing leader, to meet him;
LaHaye's Left Behind novels, dramatising the rapture, Armageddon
and the second coming, have sold tens of millions.
But it is almost certain that Cleveland was the first time Bush
had heard of Phillips's book. He was the visionary strategist
for Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign; his 1969 book, The
Emerging Republican Majority, spelled out the shift of power
from the north-east to the south and south-west, which he was
early to call "the sunbelt"; he grasped that southern Democrats
would react to the civil-rights revolution by becoming southern
Republicans; he also understood the resentments of urban ethnic
Catholics towards black people on issues such as crime, school
integration and jobs. But he never imagined that evangelical
religion would transform the coalition he helped to fashion into
something that horrifies him.
In American Theocracy, Phillips describes Bush as the founder of
"the first American religious party"; September 11 gave him the
pretext for "seizing the fundamentalist moment"; he has
manipulated a "critical religious geography" to hype issues such
as gay marriage. "New forces were being interwoven. These
included the institutional rise of the religious right, the
intensifying biblical focus on the Middle East, and the
deepening of insistence on church-government collaboration
within the GOP electorate." It portended a potential "American
Disenlightenment," apparent in Bush's hostility to science.
Even Bush's failures have become pretexts for advancing his
transformation of government. Exploiting his own disastrous
emergency management after Hurricane Katrina, Bush is funneling
funds to churches as though they can compensate for governmental
breakdown. Last year David Kuo, the White House deputy director
for faith-based initiatives, resigned with a statement that
"Republicans were indifferent to the poor".
Within hours of its publication, American Theocracy rocketed to
No 1 on Amazon. At US cinemas, V for Vendetta - in which an
imaginary Britain, ruled by a totalitarian, faith-based regime
that rounds up gays, is a metaphor for Bush's America - is the
surprise hit. Bush has succeeded in getting American audiences
to cheer for terrorism.
Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton,
is the author of The Clinton Wars - sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
