Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

In a desperate attempt to not watch the Sox get swept, I noticed that Cosma said everyone would be writing about the Times Magazine article on President Bush’s faith-based presidency (my cache) — a presidency wherein the man doesn’t listen to anyone who disagrees with him, and seems to genuinely believe that he is God’s vessel. I’d like to point out two passages. First is the one that everyone is (rightly) quoting:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors  . . .  and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

So that’s frightening. The effect on me would probably be worse if the Scotch weren’t still wearing off.

One reasonable question here is, “All right, fine: I like the idea of a benevolent dictatorship. They’re good leaders; they know what they’re doing. I’ll let them lead me by faith.” So then we check out our president’s knowledge of geography (defined as “the study of the world that he could annihilate without much effort”):

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored “road map” for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman — the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress — mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

“I don’t know why you’re talking about Sweden,” Bush said. “They’re the neutral one. They don’t have an army.”

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: “Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They’re the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.” Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. “No, no, it’s Sweden that has no army.”

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

December of 2002. A year and change after September 11. Shouldn’t the president’s education have gone into overdrive right then?

But never mind that. I’m still trying to escape from the Sox. So onward I go through Cosma’s writings. I found a reference to a book which just sounds fascinating and great: Martin W. Lewis’s The Myth Of Continents, whose thesis seems to be that the system wherein the world is divided into seven continents is a bad historical artifact. That alone wouldn’t be worth all that much (it’s never made sense to me that Europe and Asia are two separate continents), but I gather the book is really carefully and deeply written.

Then there’s a book which may be a strong argument against the “they hate our freedom” school of thought: Yahya Sadowski’s The Myth Of Global Chaos.

Cosma also points to a really delicious Mike Taibbi smackdown of Tom Friedman (my cache), the latter of whom would be in the running for the position of my least-favorite Times columnist if Bill Safire and David Brooks weren’t fighting so very hard for that title. Taibbi gives us

“Grapes of Wrath,” March 12. Perhaps my favorite Friedman piece of all time. He begins with the delicious image of listening to the Battle Hymn of the Republic on his car stereo, and then moves on to his central idea: This war is a "gut call," and his gut "has told [him] four things." First: This is a war of choice. Second: Reconstructing Iraq will be more difficult than we think. Third: We ought to take our time there once we’re in. And fourth: The majority of the world still hopes to avert war.

Unwittingly, Friedman has led his reader on a tour through the four chambers of his stomach. He has literally revealed to the world that he is a cow. It would take a genius on the order of Shakespeare to invent a character capable of writing such a thing.