This morning Frank Rich mentioned the fact that Donald Rumsfeld had larded his daily secret reports to George Bush with biblical quotes. The information comes from an article in GQ Magazine written by Robert Draper:
Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
That particular portion of Rich’s column provoked a strong reaction, but you have to see the accompanying photos to get the full, sickening effect. You can view a slideshow here (via Firedoglake)
Call me a cynic, but I refuse to believe that Bush is religious in the conventional sense of the world. The man is a sociopath. What this pitch to religiosity did, in Bush’s case, was reinforce his belief in his own infallibility and in the righteousness of anything that he chose to do. If God was with him, after all, who could be against him. Or, at least, why listen to anyone who was against him. For Bush, God “exists” only to affirm Bush. Rumsfeld apparently played him like a violin. It’s truly scary to think Rumsfeld and Cheney, Bush’s very intelligent fellow sociopaths, played their intellectual inferior like a violin.
Rich is right, by the way. We can’t turn the page on the Bush presidency. It’s not a book. It’s an infected wound. We either drain the pus, or die from the infection.
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