corrente

The line that was supposed to be the "knockout punch" against Kerry last week--the "reduce terrorism to the level of a nuisance" line--came from last week's NYT Magazine article about John Kerry. That was a long interview with the man himself.

This week we have the Bush story. Written by Ron Suskind, it is not, surprisingly enough, based on a long interview with Bush. Nor anybody in his administration...

officially anyway.

(via NYT)

The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic ''base'' that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ''you can be certain and be wrong.''

This story runs ten pages long in the online format, and I doubt that there will be anything in it that comes as a great shock to regular readers here. But take a look at it anyway because it pulls together into one place the factor that makes Bush so different, and so terrifying, and in the end so laughable.

Bush has faith all right. Ooodles and oodles of faith. But it isn't faith in Jesus Christ, or even in an abstract "Almighty," it's faith in his own personal innards. His unreliable heart, his diverticular colon, his ravaged liver, his peevish spleen. He believes only in Himself, and not even his most attractive parts at that.