[Mb-civic] The Church of Bush

Mon Aug 2 20:38:10 PDT 2004

The Church of Bush 

By Rick Perlstein, Village Voice
 Posted on August 2, 2004, Printed on August 2, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/19425/

Here are some things that Christopher Nunneley, a conservative activist in
Birmingham, Alabama, believes. That some time in June, apparently unnoticed
by the world media, George Bush negotiated an end to the civil war in Sudan.
That Bill Clinton is "lazy" and Teresa Heinz Kerry is an "African
colonialist." That "we don't do torture," and that the School of the
Americas manuals showing we do were "just ancient U.S. disinformation
designed to make the Soviets think that we didn't know how to do real
interrogations."

Chris Nunneley also believes something crazy: that George W. Bush is a nice
guy.

It's a rather different conclusion than many liberals would make. When we
think of Bush's character, we're likely to focus on the administration's
proposed budget cuts for veterans, the children indefinitely detained at Abu
Ghraib, maybe the story of how the young lad Bush loaded up live frogs with
firecrackers in order to watch them explode.

Conservatives see it differently.

"He's very compassionate," says Chris, an intelligent man who's open-minded
enough to make listening to liberals a sort of hobby. "If you look at the
way he's bucked the far right: I mean, $15 billion for AIDS in Africa!" He
speaks at the church services of blacks, and "you don't fake that. That's
not just a photo op."

Of course, two years after Bush made his pledge, only 2 percent of the AIDS
money has been distributed (in any event, it will mainly go to drug
companies). And appearing earnest in the presence of African Americans has
been a documented Bush strategy for wooing moderate voters since the
beginning.

So what does a conservative say when such "nice guy" jazz is challenged?
Say, when you ask whether a nice guy would invade a country at the cost of
untold innocent lives on the shakiest of pretenses? Or, closer to home,
whether he would (as Bush did in late 2000) go on a fishing trip while his
daughter was undergoing surgery, and use the world's media to mockingly
order her to clean her room while he was away? Doesn't signify with Chris.
"If you're in one camp, the idea of being firm, 'tough love,' is very
popular. If you're in another, you can say, 'Well, that's just mean!' On my
side, well, I like the whole idea of 'tough love.' "

This is a journey among the "tough love" camp. The people who, even in the
face of evidence of his casual cruelty, of his habitual and unchristian
contempt for weakness, love George Bush unconditionally: love him when he is
tender, love him when he is tough  but who never, ever are tough on him.

On July 15, the Bush-Cheney campaign organized 6,925 "Parties for the
President" in supporters' homes nationwide. I chose to attend in Portland,
Oregon. The right love to believe the whole world is against them. In a
county where Ralph Nader got a quarter of the votes of George Bush and Al
Gore well over double, the sense of martyrdom is especially fragrant:
Portland's conservatives are like others anywhere, only more so. One leader
told me that here, it's the conservatives who are oppressed by the gays.

They certainly love them some George Bush.

Twelve people gather on the houseboat of Bruce Broussard, a perennially
failed candidate popular among local conservatives for, well, his race: He
is African American. First the group hears Laura Bush on a conference call.
("All of us know what makes George a great president. He has the courage of
his convictions, the willingness to make the tough decisions and stick with
them.") Then, they get a bewilderingly disjointed address from their host
(he hits some key points from his recent Senate platform: presidential terms
of six years instead of four, a cabinet-level Department of Senior Citizens
with himself as secretary). Finally, beef-and-cheese dip loading down a
plateful of Mrs. Broussard's homemade tortilla chips, I open the floor to
the question of why they personally revere George Bush.

Ponytailed Larry, who wears the stripes of a former marine gunnery sergeant
on his floppy hat, bursts into laughter; it's too obvious to take seriously.
"Honesty. Truth. Integrity," he says upon recovering. "I don't think there's
any difference between the governor of Texas and the president of the United
States."

Gingerly, I offer one difference: The governor ran for president on a
platform of balanced budgets, then ran the federal budget straight into the
red.

Responds Larry (of the first president since James Garfield with a Congress
compliant enough never to issue a single veto): "Well, it's interesting that
we blame the person who happens to be president for the deficit. As if he
has any control over the legislature of the United States."

Larry's wife, Tami Mars, the Republican congressional nominee for Oregon's
third district, proposes a Divine Right of Eight-Year Terms: "Let the man
finish what he started. Instead of switching out his leadership  because
that's what the terrorists are expecting."

Larry is asked what he thinks of Bush's budget cuts for troops in the field.
He's not with Bush on everything: "I hope he reverses himself on that."

I note that he already has, due to Democratic pressure.

Faced with an existential impossibility  giving the Democrats credit for
anything  he retreats into a retort I'll hear again and again tonight:
Nobody's perfect. "I don't think we're going to find a situation in which we
find a person with which we're 100 percent comfortable."

Then he reels off a litany of complaints about Bush. "Horrible
underemployment situation . . . the big-business aspect of the Republican
Party I have some issues with."

The next thing I hear is the last refuge of the cornered conservative: a non
sequitur fulmination against the hippie Democrats.

"Having said that, what's your option? To have more bike trails?"

The vibe at my next stop is different. None of the people at Kitty and Tom
Harmon's bungalow are stupid. Instead they are the kind of "well-informed"
that comes from overlong exposure to conservative media: conservatives who
construct towers of impressive intellectual complexity on toothpick-weak
foundations. My hosts are Stepford-nice (Mom sports "Hello Kitty!" seat
covers in her car and loads me down with shortbread for the flight home; Dad
shows off the herb garden he'll use to season my eggs if I consent to stay
the night). But everyone present shows a glint of steel when their man's
character is challenged.

"One of the reasons I respect this president is that he is honest. I believe
that after eight years, the dark years of the Clinton administration, we
finally have a man in the White House who respects that office and who
speaks honestly."

The speaker is Christina, an intense, articulate, and passionate publicist.

"Such a refreshing change for the country. People believe in the president."

I don't mention recent poll figures suggesting that more Americans believe
John Kerry than Bush when it comes to terrorism.

After affirming "I still believe that there are weapons of mass destruction"
 the commonplace is beyond challenge  Christina displays another facet of
the conservative fantasy: Going into Iraq, she says, "is not the sort of
thing one does if one wants to be popular. . . . He doesn't stick his finger
in the wind." I don't challenge that point, either  though if I did I might
ask why Bush scheduled the divisive debate over the intervention for the
height of the 2002 campaign season, more certain of what Andrew Card called
"new products" than his father, who held off deliberation on the first Iraq
war until after the 1990 congressional elections.

Instead I challenge the grandmotherly lady sitting on the piano bench.

Says Delores: "There is an agenda  to get rid of God in our country."

Chirps the reporter: Certainly not on the part of John Kerry, who once
entertained dreams of entering the priesthood.

I'm almost laughed out of the room.

I ask why Kerry goes to mass every week if he's trying to get rid of God.
"Public relations!" a young man calls out from across the room. "Same reason
he does everything else." Cue for Delores to repeat something a rabbi told
her: "We have to stand together, because this is what happened in Europe.
You know  once they start taking this right and that right. And you have
the Islamic people . . . "

She trails off. I ask whether she's referring to the rise of fascism. "We're
losing our rights as Christians: yes. And being persecuted again."

I ask why so many liberals believe the administration lies, if there might
be anything to the suspicions. What about the report of the Los Angeles
Times that morning, that the State Department dismissed 28 of the claims the
White House demanded Colin Powell bring before the U.N. as without
foundation in fact?

Delores: "You make mention of a paper in Los Angeles that made such and such
a report; well, that doesn't mean it's accurate or complete or unbiased."

I respond that the report came from a memo reproduced in the recent report
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican-dominated. I'm not sure
whether she hasn't heard me or just has decided to change the subject. "John
Kerry attended a party in which there was bad language, bad humor, being
evidenced in all quarters!" she cries. Kitty chimes in: "And Kerry said it
reflects American values!"

I ask Tom what role he sees in America for nonbelievers. "Well, if people
are of an opinion that their God is supreme and are willing to burn your
house down to prove it or dismantle your car to prove it or make all sorts
of loud noises, disturbing the peace, and say that they have a right to do
that in the name of God. . . ." he begins, in his best Mr. Rogers voice.
Later I parse out what the hell he was talking about. I was asking about
atheists. But Tom understood "nonbeliever" according to the premise that God
is exclusively Judeo-Christian. It wasn't about whether you believe in
anything, but whether you dared diverge from his belief.

Walking me to my car (he insisted), Tom, who works for a construction
conglomerate, reaches for a favorite metaphor to describe George Bush:
linoleum. "You know: Usually you get a microfilm of the color, and if you
drop a plate on it you discover it's an ugly-looking floor. Then linoleum
came out  the pattern goes through the entire one-eighth of material. You
can drop a plate on it, and the color is true all the way down!"

His face glows. He gets a far-off look in his eyes. That's his Bush.

It's like a scene from a John Waters movie.

What all does it mean? The right-wing website Free Republic is infamous for
galvanizing harassment campaigns against ideological enemies, but it also
has a lighter side: a robust culture of George W. kitsch. "Freepers" display
and study the famous photograph of Bush embracing Ashley Faulkner, whose
mother perished on 9-11, a woeful, iconic look on his face ("The protective
encirclement of her head by President Bush's arm and hand is the essence of
fatherly compassion," Freeper luvbach1 writes); the ladies exchange snaps of
the president in resolute pose, rendering up racy comments about his
sexiness; they reference an image of Bush jogging alongside a soldier
wounded in Iraq like it's a Xerox of his very soul. "He's the kind of guy
who's going to remember to call a soldier who's lost a leg," one citizen of
the Free Republic reflects, "and go jogging with him when he gets a
replacement prosthetic." Revering Bush has become, for people like this, a
defining component of conservative ideology.

Once I interviewed a Freeper who told me he first became a committed
conservative after discovering the Federalist Papers. "I absolutely devoured
them, recognizing, my God, these things were written hundreds of years ago
and they still stand up as some of the most intense political philosophy
ever written."

I happen to agree, so I asked him  after he insisted Bush couldn't have
been lying when he claimed to have witnessed the first plane hit the World
Trade Center live on TV, after he said the orders to torture in Iraq
couldn't have possibly come from the top, all because George Bush is too
fundamentally decent to lie  what he thinks of the Federalists' most famous
message: that the genius of the Constitution they were defending was that
you needn't base your faith in the country on the fundamental decency of an
individual, because no one can be trusted to be fundamentally decent, which
was why the Constitution established a government of laws, not
personalities.

"If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on
government would be necessary . . . "

Conservatives see something angelic in George Bush. That's why they excuse,
repress, and rationalize away so much.

And that is why conservatism is verging on becoming an un-American creed.