DVD review: GEORGE W. BUSH: FAITH IN THE WHITE HOUSE

By Frank Rich

You can run but you can't hide: Oct. 5 will bring the perfect storm in this
year's culture wars. It's on that strategically chosen date, four Tuesdays
before the election, that the DVD of "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be released along
with not one but two new Michael Moore books. It's also the release date of the
equally self-effacing Ann Coulter's latest rant, of a new DVD documentary,
"Horns and Halos," that revisits the Bush mystery year of 1972, and of an
R.E.M. album, "Around the Sun," that gets in its own political licks at the
state of the nation.

When Dick Cheney and John Edwards debate in Cleveland that night, Bruce
Springsteen will be barnstorming in another swing state, as the Vote for Change
tour hits St. Paul. All that's needed to make the day complete is a smackdown
between Kinky Friedman and Teresa Heinz Kerry on "Imus in the Morning."

Of the many cultural grenades being tossed that day, though, the one must-see
is "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House," a DVD that is being specifically
marketed in "head to head" partisan opposition to "Fahrenheit 9/11." This
documentary first surfaced at the Republican convention in New York, where it
was previewed in tandem with an invitation-only, no-press-allowed "Family,
Faith and Freedom Rally," a Ralph Reed-Sam Brownback jamboree thrown by the
Bush campaign for Christian conservatives. Though you can buy the DVD for
$14.95, its makers told the right-wing news service WorldNetDaily.com that they
plan to distribute 300,000 copies to America's churches. And no wonder. This
movie aspires to be "The Passion of the Bush," and it succeeds.

More than any other campaign artifact, it clarifies the hard-knuckles rationale
of the president's vote-for-me-or-face-Armageddon re-election message. It
transforms the president that the Democrats deride as a "fortunate son" of
privilege into a prodigal son with the "moral clarity of an old-fashioned
biblical prophet." Its Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but God's
essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth. The stations of his cross are
burnished into cinematic fable: the misspent youth, the hard drinking (a thirst
that came from "a throat full of Texas dust"), the fateful 40th-birthday
hangover in Colorado Springs, the walk on the beach with Billy Graham. A
towheaded child actor bathed in the golden light of an off-camera halo
re-enacts the young George comforting his mom after the death of his sister;
it's a parable anticipating the future president's miraculous ability to
comfort us all after 9/11. An older Bush impersonator is seen rebuffing a
sexual come-on from a fellow Bush-Quayle campaign worker hovering by a Xerox
machine in 1988; it's an effort to imbue our born-again savior with retroactive
chastity. As for the actual president, he is shown with a flag for a backdrop
in a split-screen tableau with Jesus. The message isn't subtle: they were
separated at birth.

"Faith in the White House" purports to be the product of "independent
research," uncoordinated with the Bush-Cheney campaign. But many of its talking
heads are official or unofficial administration associates or sycophants. They
include the evangelical leader and presidential confidant Ted Haggard (who is
also one of Mel Gibson's most fervent P.R. men) and Deal Hudson, an adviser to
the Bush-Cheney campaign until August, when he resigned following The National
Catholic Reporter's investigation of accusations that he sexually harassed an
18-year-old Fordham student in the 1990's. As for the documentary's "research,"
a film positioning itself as a scrupulously factual "alternative" to
"Fahrenheit 9/11" should not inflate Mr. Bush's early business "success" with
Arbusto Energy (an outright bust for most of its investors) or the number of
children he's had vaccinated in Iraq ("more than 22 million," the movie claims,
in a country whose total population is 25 million).

"Will George W. Bush be allowed to finish the battle against the forces of evil
that threaten our very existence?" Such is the portentous question posed at the
film's conclusion by its narrator, the religious broadcaster Janet Parshall,
beloved by some for her ecumenical generosity in inviting Jews for Jesus onto
her radio show during the High Holidays. Anyone who stands in the way of Mr.
Bush completing his godly battle, of course, is a heretic. Facts on the ground
in Iraq don't matter. Rational arguments mustered in presidential debates don't
matter. Logic of any kind is a nonstarter. The president - who after 9/11
called the war on terrorism a "crusade," until protests forced the White House
to backpedal - is divine. He may not hear "voices" instructing him on policy,
testifies Stephen Mansfield, the author of one of the movie's source texts,
"The Faith of George W. Bush," but he does act on "promptings" from God. "I
think we went into Iraq not so much because there were weapons of mass
destruction," Mr. Mansfield has explained elsewhere, "but because Bush had
concluded that Saddam Hussein was an evildoer" in the battle "between good and
evil." So why didn't we go into those other countries in the axis of evil,
North Korea or Iran? Never mind. To ask such questions is to be against God and
"with the terrorists."

The propagandists of "Faith in the White House" argue, as others have, that the
president's invocation of religion in the public sphere, from his citation of
Jesus as his favorite "political philosopher" to his incessant invocation of
the Almighty in talking about how everything is coming up roses in Iraq, is
consistent with the civic spirituality practiced by his antecedents, from the
founding fathers to Bill Clinton. It's not. Past presidents have rarely, if
ever, claimed such godlike infallibility. Mr. Bush never admits to making a
mistake; even his premature "Mission Accomplished" victory lap wasn't in error,
as he recently told Bill O'Reilly. After all, if you believe "God wants me to
be president" - a quote attributed to Mr. Bush by the Rev. Richard Land of the
Southern Baptist Convention - it's a given that you are incapable of making
mistakes. Those who say you have are by definition committing blasphemy. A
God-appointed leader even has the power to rewrite His texts. Jim Wallis, the
liberal evangelical author, has pointed out Mr. Bush's habit of rejiggering
specific scriptural citations so that, say, the light shining into the darkness
is no longer God's light but America's and, by inference, the president's own.

It's not just Mr. Bush's self-deification that separates him from the likes of
Lincoln, however; it's his chosen fashion of Christianity. The president didn't
revive the word "crusade" idly in the fall of 2001. His view of faith as a
Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war
against evil is synergistic with the violent poetics of the best-selling "Left
Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson's cinematic
bloodfest. The majority of Christian Americans may not agree with this
apocalyptic worldview, but there's a big market for it. A Newsweek poll shows
that 17 percent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. To Karl
Rove and company, that 17 percent is otherwise known as "the base."

The pandering to that base has become familiar in countless administration
policies, starting with its antipathy to stem-cell research, abortion, condoms
for H.I.V. prevention and gay civil rights. But ever since Mr. Bush's
genuflection to Bob Jones University threatened to shoo away moderates in 2000,
the Rove ruse is to try to keep the most militant and sectarian tactics of the
Bush religious program under the radar. (Mr. Rove even tried to deny that the
wooden lectern at the Republican convention was a pulpit embedded with a cross,
as if a nation of eyewitnesses could all be mistaken.) The re-election
juggernaut has not only rounded up the membership rosters of churches en masse
but quietly mounted official Web sites like kerrywrongforcatholics.com as well.
(Evangelicals and Mormons have their own Web variants on this same theme, but
not the Jews, who are apparently getting in Kerry just what they deserve.) Even
the contraband C-word is being revived out of sight of most of the press: Marc
Racicot, the Bush-Cheney campaign chairman, lobbed a direct-mail fund-raising
letter in March describing Mr. Bush as "leading a global crusade against
terrorism."

In this spring's classic "South Park" parody, "The Passion of the Jew," in
which Mr. Gibson's movie tosses the community into a religious war, one of the
kids concludes: "If you want to be Christian, that's cool, but you should focus
on what Jesus taught instead of how he got killed. Focusing on how he got
killed is what people did in the Dark Ages, and it ends up with really bad
results." He has a point. It's far from clear that Mr. Bush's eschatology and
his religious vanity are leading to good results now. The all-seeing president
who could pronounce Vladimir Putin saintly by looking into his "soul" is now
refusing to acknowledge that the reverse may be true. The general in charge of
tracking down Osama bin Laden, William G. Boykin, has earned cheers in some
quarters for giving speeches at churches proclaiming that Mr. Bush is "in the
White House because God put him there" to lead the "army of God" against "a guy
named Satan." But all that preaching didn't get his day job done; he hasn't
snared the guy named Osama he was supposed to bring back "dead or alive."

"George W. Bush: Faith in the White House" must be seen because it shows how
someone like General Boykin can stay in his job even in failure and why Mr.
Bush feels divinely entitled to keep his job even as we stand on the cusp of an
abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview, faith, or at least a
certain brand of it, counts more than competence, and a biblical mission, or at
least a simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile of one, counts more than the secular
goal of waging an effective, focused battle against an enemy as elusive and
cunning as terrorists. That no one in this documentary, including its hero,
acknowledges any constitutional boundaries between church and state is hardly a
surprise. To them, America is a "Christian nation," period, with no need even
for the fig-leaf prefix of "Judeo-."

Far more startling is the inability of a president or his acolytes to
acknowledge any boundary that might separate Mr. Bush's flawed actions battling
"against the forces of evil" from the righteous dictates of God. What that
level of hubris might bring in a second term is left to the imagination, and
"Faith in the White House" gives the imagination room to run riot about what a
21st-century crusade might look like in the flesh. A documentary conceived as a
rebuke to "Fahrenheit 9/11" is nothing if not its unintentional and
considerably more nightmarish sequel.

copyright 2004 New York Times

RFCSAC627N

Who gives a crap.

Yazandtony

I feel sorry for those who are influenced by this kind of stuff regardless
if its right or left wing propaganda. If you don't know who you're voting
for by now based on your own beliefs and convictions, then I feel sorry for
your lack of self thinking.


--
RnR Lesnar
It's True, It's True- Kurt Angle
Bush/Cheney 2004

RnR Lesnar

RnR Lesnar wrote:
> I feel sorry for those who are influenced by this kind of stuff regardless
> if its right or left wing propaganda. If you don't know who you're voting
> for by now based on your own beliefs and convictions, then I feel sorry for
> your lack of self thinking.

You support the dumbest president ever came to power and who failed to
protect america on Sept., 11, 2001.

RR

(RFCSAC627N) wrote in message news:<>...

> Its Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but God's
> essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth.

If that's the best God can do, I'm very disappointed.

-Eric

Eric R.

On 5 Oct 2004 06:57:38 -0700, (Eric R.) wrote:

> (RFCSAC627N) wrote in message news:<>...
>
>> Its Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but God's
>> essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth.
>
>If that's the best God can do, I'm very disappointed.
>
>-Eric

rimshot

--
Still Howlin' at the Moon!

Wild Coyote
wild_coyote<AT>whoppermail.com

Wild Coyote

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Wild Coyote wrote:

> On 5 Oct 2004 06:57:38 -0700, (Eric R.) wrote:
>
> > (RFCSAC627N) wrote in message news:<>...
> >
> >> Its Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but God's
> >> essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth.
> >
> >If that's the best God can do, I'm very disappointed.
>
> *rimshot*

Well, the blurb on the website *does* say that GWB has spent more time on
his knees than any other president...

swac

Stephen Cooke

"RR" <> wrote in message
news:L2v8d.4686$Sl2.1062@trnddc09...
> RnR Lesnar wrote:
>> I feel sorry for those who are influenced by this kind of stuff
>> regardless if its right or left wing propaganda. If you don't know who
>> you're voting for by now based on your own beliefs and convictions, then
>> I feel sorry for your lack of self thinking.
>
> You support the dumbest president ever came to power and who failed to
> protect america on Sept., 11, 2001.

If you have the mental capacity to imagine this scenerio, what would you
have done? The president had received information that a group out of
Afghanistan being harbored by the Taliban was planning to destroy the world
trade center. Bush responds by telling the public that airport security is
going to be taken to new highs that are going to make it a royal pain to
catch a flight, billions will be spent on upping security, and on the
foreign front, we need to go pre-emptively invade Afghanistan and put an end
to the Taliban and the Al-Queda camps that they harbor. I can guarantee you
that you and everyone else that hates Bush would have been out their
protesting saying he would be Hitler for doing that. Going into Iraq is
exactly what you're criticizing Bush for not doing prior to 9-11.


--
RnR Lesnar
It's True, It's True- Kurt Angle
Bush/Cheney 2004

RnR Lesnar

Stephen Cooke <> wrote in message news:<Pine.GSO.3.95.iB1.0.1041005181921.3993B->...

> Well, the blurb on the website *does* say that GWB has spent more time on
> his knees than any other president...

The Saudis say he gives the best head they've ever had.

-Eric

Eric R.

In article <L2v8d.4686$Sl2.1062@trnddc09>,
RR <> wrote:

> You support the dumbest president ever came to power and who failed to
> protect america on Sept., 11, 2001.

What do you expect? The guy watches pro-wrestling for gods sake. To him,
George Bush's broken English must come off as pure poetic genius. The
dumb follow the dumb.

I can only assume RnR is an acronym for "Redneck Retard."
--
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people,
and neither do we." - George Dubya Bush

Vote Kerry 2004

Black Locust