Is bush really religious, or is it a role he plays to bring in the Republican religious right? Glenn Greenwald has one opinion, and booman has another.
Booman thinks it is a scam, one that Shrub took on the help his father get elected President. Glenn thinks that Bush is serious, that he has really needed the "belief in a higher power" to escape from alcohol.
I come down decisively in the middle. I think they are both correct. I suspect that Shrub originally did take on the job of Liaison to the religious right for his father, and he also was trying to quit alcohol at the same time. I think he did the typical addicts' game of talking to please his audience, and used his alcohol problems as an excuse to explain why he had suddenly found God. Then I think it grew on him. Not the religion, but the feeling that he belonged and was accepted.
Then I think he tried to get serious about quitting alcohol and getting back together with his wife. His problem with the twins suggests that it didn't happen early enough in their lives, though. His rather miraculous rise to first Governor of Texas and then to President may have convinced him that God had to be handing him those jobs, because Shrub sure knows that he didn't earn them. What more proof could he ask of God's existence?
If it had stopped there, I have no doubt that Bush would be a seriously religious person. Then came 9/11.
OK. That could just have been the challenge that God placed him into the Presidency to deal with. But then he listened to Cheney and the NeoCons as though they were speaking the words of God for him to follow.
The continued failures since then very likely have shaken whatever there was of his Faith. I really doubt that much is left now.
So I guess I am cynical enough to go with Booman mostly. Just not completely.
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