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WTF, WTF....
George W. Bush, in one of his moments of clarity, has explained it all to us.
"I fully understand that the job of the president is and must always be protecting the great right of people to worship or not worship as they see fit. That's what distinguishes us from the Taliban. The greatest freedom we have or one of the greatest freedoms is the right to worship the way you see fit. On the other hand, I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord."
Which is interesting.
Americans will be better informed than I about this, but I would have thought that the sort of born-again self-obsessed certainty that GWB is talking about was comparatively rare among Presidents, and certainly among great ones. Washington? I doubt it. Jefferson? Certainly not. Adams? Doubtful Lincoln? Certainly not. Teddy Roosevelt? Unlikely. FDR? Nope. Eisenhower? Not a chance. LBJ? You're joking of course.
Whereas duff Presidents - Woodrow Wilson for example- are quite another matter.
There are one or two great British PMs who were religious - Gladstone is the obvious one - but he would have regarded being born-again as a piece of presumptuous claptrap. Churchill, on the other hand - and before anyone says anything I believe him colossally over-rated, massively wrong on a whole bunch of issues and still a great PM - was almost entirely godless.
Apart from what GWB's views mean for the separation of church and state, there is the colossal arrogance, so typical of his sort of Christian, in his assumption that the way he does things is the only way. He also seems to think he is an adequate President.
Quos vult perdire, dementat is so much more succinct than Whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad that I make no apologies for using the Latin.
"I fully understand that the job of the president is and must always be protecting the great right of people to worship or not worship as they see fit. That's what distinguishes us from the Taliban. The greatest freedom we have or one of the greatest freedoms is the right to worship the way you see fit. On the other hand, I don't see how you can be president at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord."
Which is interesting.
Americans will be better informed than I about this, but I would have thought that the sort of born-again self-obsessed certainty that GWB is talking about was comparatively rare among Presidents, and certainly among great ones. Washington? I doubt it. Jefferson? Certainly not. Adams? Doubtful Lincoln? Certainly not. Teddy Roosevelt? Unlikely. FDR? Nope. Eisenhower? Not a chance. LBJ? You're joking of course.
Whereas duff Presidents - Woodrow Wilson for example- are quite another matter.
There are one or two great British PMs who were religious - Gladstone is the obvious one - but he would have regarded being born-again as a piece of presumptuous claptrap. Churchill, on the other hand - and before anyone says anything I believe him colossally over-rated, massively wrong on a whole bunch of issues and still a great PM - was almost entirely godless.
Apart from what GWB's views mean for the separation of church and state, there is the colossal arrogance, so typical of his sort of Christian, in his assumption that the way he does things is the only way. He also seems to think he is an adequate President.
Quos vult perdire, dementat is so much more succinct than Whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad that I make no apologies for using the Latin.
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I have no objection to people being arrogant gits if they are Jefferson or Lincoln, though in the latter case at least he was capable of major changes of heart, for example on the subject of the future of African Americans. He started off as a 'scientific' racist who assumed the best thing would be to ship them back to Africa and then changed his mind and was prepared to contemplate full equality before the law. Jefferson was far more of a git, but again, his actual achievements and virtues account for this.
The thing GWB is proudest of is retaining his sobriety, which hey! good for him, but lots of people manage that.
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(Anonymous) 2005-01-14 01:24 pm (UTC)(link)Lin
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What counts is not whether he personally were a racist, but what he did. Truman was pretty racist, but when the chips were down he supported civil rights. Wilson's policies for blacks were pretty bad all right, but I don't believe racial policy is a GO TO JAIL, GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL card that trumps everything else. Let's judge him by mixing it up with all his other policies. The most important single policy of his term was the League of Nations, for which he gets an A for vision and an F for implementation.
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