Hello, this is Cassandra speaking.........
I have a unique view into the fundamentalist camp and the fundamentalists do indeed pose a threat to our freedom. If GW is not an evangelical fundamentalist, he's a better, more consistent actor that I can give him credit for. According to GW's own report, (according to Didion in the assigned article for this thread) he saw the light beginning with a walk with Billy Graham on a beach in Kennebunkport in the summer of 1985 in which "the mustard seed of faith" was implanted within him by the Reverend Graham. However GW had such a problem with alcohol addiction he back slid frequently until the:
Quote:"famous birthday party at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs where everyone ended up too hung over to visit the Air Force Academy Chapel and the President's son quit drinking."
There are numerous incidents of obvious black slidings like the one reported by Didion in the article:
Quote:According to Christopher Andersen's George and Laura: Portrait of an American Marriage, he once in a Mexican restaurant in Dallas launched a rabid attack on Al Hunt, the Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, colliding with other diners as he made his way to the table where Hunt was sitting with his wife, the television correspondent Judy Woodruff, and their four-year-old son. When he reached the Hunts, "red-faced" and "clearly intoxicated," he pointed a finger and began shouting.
"You no good ******* son of a bitch!" George W. screamed while other diners looked on in shock. "I will never ******* forget what you wrote!" For the next minute or so, W. stayed at the table, continuing his diatribe against the story [a story about the 1988 campaign in which Hunt had been quoted] in the Washingtonian. But Hunt could not imagine what could have provoked such rage. He had not even mentioned the elder Bush in the Washingtonian article, much less criticized him. With that, W. weaved his way through the restaurant and out to the parking lot.
And another:
Quote:Again according to Andersen, Bush's only response to a late-night kitchen-table ultimatum from his own wife ("either their marriage or the bottle") was to study her for a beat, get up, walk over to the kitchen counter, and pour himself another bourbon.
Both these incidents took place in 1986.
(I've heard more stories which are consistent with these above and personally know of others.)
Until, as the story goes, GW,
Quote:the not-yet president, then soon to begin his second term as governor of Texas, heard the pastor of the Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas [the late Rev. Clayton Bell] deliver a sermon about the reluctance Moses felt when chosen by God to lead his people out of Egypt, experienced a "defining moment" from which he drew the conclusion, as he put it in A Charge to Keep, the campaign autobiography he began with Mickey Herskowitz and finished with Karen Hughes, that people are "starved for leadership," and decided to run for president. "I believe God wants me to be president, but if that doesn't happen, it's OK," he was reported to have told a group in Texas in 1999.
Didion makes the following point:
However, I don't entirely agree with Didion on this point. The additive personality, so clearly evident in GW for years since his childhood, is entirely consistent with the addiction of a born again fundamentalist evangelical. The addiction is for a simple, black or white answer, the "stubborn certainty" to which Didion refers. If he were merely a clever politician, I would not be as worried as I am by my belief that he is indeed a full fledged fundy. GW, Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft (our Attorney General, no less) and likely Karl Rove (as well as many others in Congress and those waiting in the wings to be appointed judges if GW is reelected) have an obsessive compulsive need for easy, grossly over simplified solutions to highly complicated world problems. A true believer is much more dangerous than a shrew politician. (Isn't it difficult to think of GW as shrew?)
george,
These folks are not like Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King or members of the NAACP which you see as "bullies". Tartarin has already aptly spoken to this point . These people intend, and see it as entirely reasonable, to diminish the personal freedoms we have come to confidently take for granted all these many years. They are not only organized. They not only have the intent. But they are already highly successful. The combined strength of the evangelicals with the neocons, presents an imminent threat to our democratic freedoms.
I am very frustrated with you, that you persist in believing, as apparently Richard Dawkins does as well, that they are innocuous "nutters." Nutters they are, but innocuous they are not.