The Passion of the Bush

[which strikes me as a great title for an avant-garde porn film. probably been 
done.]

<excerpt>
Of the many cultural grenades being tossed that day, though, the one must-see 
is "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House," a DVD that is being 
specifically marketed in "head to head" partisan opposition to "Fahrenheit 
9/11." This documentary first surfaced at the Republican convention in New 
York, where it was previewed in tandem with an invitation-only, no-press-
allowed "Family, Faith and Freedom Rally," a Ralph Reed-Sam Brownback jamboree 
thrown by the Bush campaign for Christian conservatives.
</excerpt>

[I thought to myself, how did I miss this?  
http://www.intl-news.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=152
I think I was too busy watching the spawn of POTUS (not to mention Barbara, 
Laura, and all of the other female bond-servants of the adminstration) roll 
back feminism to about, say, 1621. -x]

FRANK RICH 
Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush

Published: October 3, 2004


ou can run but you can't hide: Oct. 5 will bring the perfect storm in this 
year's culture wars. It's on that strategically chosen date, four Tuesdays 
before the election, that the DVD of "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be released along 
with not one but two new Michael Moore books. It's also the release date of 
the equally self-effacing Ann Coulter's latest rant, of a new DVD 
documentary, "Horns and Halos," that revisits the Bush mystery year of 1972, 
and of an R.E.M. album, "Around the Sun," that gets in its own political licks 
at the state of the nation. 

 
When Dick Cheney and John Edwards debate in Cleveland that night, Bruce 
Springsteen will be barnstorming in another swing state, as the Vote for 
Change tour hits St. Paul. All that's needed to make the day complete is a 
smackdown between Kinky Friedman and Teresa Heinz Kerry on "Imus in the 
Morning."

Of the many cultural grenades being tossed that day, though, the one must-see 
is "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House," a DVD that is being 
specifically marketed in "head to head" partisan opposition to "Fahrenheit 
9/11." This documentary first surfaced at the Republican convention in New 
York, where it was previewed in tandem with an invitation-only, no-press-
allowed "Family, Faith and Freedom Rally," a Ralph Reed-Sam Brownback jamboree 
thrown by the Bush campaign for Christian conservatives. Though you can buy 
the DVD for $14.95, its makers told the right-wing news service 
WorldNetDaily.com that they plan to distribute 300,000 copies to America's 
churches. And no wonder. This movie aspires to be "The Passion of the Bush," 
and it succeeds. 

More than any other campaign artifact, it clarifies the hard-knuckles 
rationale of the president's vote-for-me-or-face-Armageddon re-election 
message. It transforms the president that the Democrats deride as a "fortunate 
son" of privilege into a prodigal son with the "moral clarity of an old-
fashioned biblical prophet." Its Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but 
God's essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth. The stations of his cross 
are burnished into cinematic fable: the misspent youth, the hard drinking (a 
thirst that came from "a throat full of Texas dust"), the fateful 40th-
birthday hangover in Colorado Springs, the walk on the beach with Billy 
Graham. A towheaded child actor bathed in the golden light of an off-camera 
halo re-enacts the young George comforting his mom after the death of his 
sister; it's a parable anticipating the future president's miraculous ability 
to comfort us all after 9/11. An older Bush impersonator is seen rebuffing a 
sexual come-on from a fellow Bush-Quayle campaign worker hovering by a Xerox 
machine in 1988; it's an effort to imbue our born-again savior with 
retroactive chastity. As for the actual president, he is shown with a flag for 
a backdrop in a split-screen tableau with Jesus. The message isn't subtle: 
they were separated at birth.

"Faith in the White House" purports to be the product of "independent 
research," uncoordinated with the Bush-Cheney campaign. But many of its 
talking heads are official or unofficial administration associates or 
sycophants. They include the evangelical leader and presidential confidant Ted 
Haggard (who is also one of Mel Gibson's most fervent P.R. men) and Deal 
Hudson, an adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign until August, when he resigned 
following The National Catholic Reporter's investigation of accusations that 
he sexually harassed an 18-year-old Fordham student in the 1990's. As for the 
documentary's "research," a film positioning itself as a scrupulously 
factual "alternative" to "Fahrenheit 9/11" should not inflate Mr. Bush's early 
business "success" with Arbusto Energy (an outright bust for most of its 
investors) or the number of children he's had vaccinated in Iraq ("more than 
22 million," the movie claims, in a country whose total population is 25 
million). 

"Will George W. Bush be allowed to finish the battle against the forces of 
evil that threaten our very existence?" Such is the portentous question posed 
at the film's conclusion by its narrator, the religious broadcaster Janet 
Parshall, beloved by some for her ecumenical generosity in inviting Jews for 
Jesus onto her radio show during the High Holidays. Anyone who stands in the 
way of Mr. Bush completing his godly battle, of course, is a heretic. Facts on 
the ground in Iraq don't matter. Rational arguments mustered in presidential 
debates don't matter. Logic of any kind is a nonstarter. The president - who 
after 9/11 called the war on terrorism a "crusade," until protests forced the 
White House to backpedal - is divine. He may not hear "voices" instructing him 
on policy, testifies Stephen Mansfield, the author of one of the movie's 
source texts, "The Faith of George W. Bush," but he does act on "promptings" 
from God. "I think we went into Iraq not so much because there were weapons of 
mass destruction," Mr. Mansfield has explained elsewhere, "but because Bush 
had concluded that Saddam Hussein was an evildoer" in the battle "between good 
and evil." So why didn't we go into those other countries in the axis of evil, 
North Korea or Iran? Never mind. To ask such questions is to be against God 
and "with the terrorists."
The propagandists of "Faith in the White House" argue, as others have, that 
the president's invocation of religion in the public sphere, from his citation 
of Jesus as his favorite "political philosopher" to his incessant invocation 
of the Almighty in talking about how everything is coming up roses in Iraq, is 
consistent with the civic spirituality practiced by his antecedents, from the 
founding fathers to Bill Clinton. It's not. Past presidents have rarely, if 
ever, claimed such godlike infallibility. Mr. Bush never admits to making a 
mistake; even his premature "Mission Accomplished" victory lap wasn't in 
error, as he recently told Bill O'Reilly. After all, if you believe "God wants 
me to be president" - a quote attributed to Mr. Bush by the Rev. Richard Land 
of the Southern Baptist Convention - it's a given that you are incapable of 
making mistakes. Those who say you have are by definition committing 
blasphemy. A God-appointed leader even has the power to rewrite His texts. Jim 
Wallis, the liberal evangelical author, has pointed out Mr. Bush's habit of 
rejiggering specific scriptural citations so that, say, the light shining into 
the darkness is no longer God's light but America's and, by inference, the 
president's own.

It's not just Mr. Bush's self-deification that separates him from the likes of 
Lincoln, however; it's his chosen fashion of Christianity. The president 
didn't revive the word "crusade" idly in the fall of 2001. His view of faith 
as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war 
against evil is synergistic with the violent poetics of the best-selling "Left 
Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson's cinematic 
bloodfest. The majority of Christian Americans may not agree with this 
apocalyptic worldview, but there's a big market for it. A Newsweek poll shows 
that 17 percent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. To 
Karl Rove and company, that 17 percent is otherwise known as "the base."

The pandering to that base has become familiar in countless administration 
policies, starting with its antipathy to stem-cell research, abortion, condoms 
for H.I.V. prevention and gay civil rights. But ever since Mr. Bush's 
genuflection to Bob Jones University threatened to shoo away moderates in 
2000, the Rove ruse is to try to keep the most militant and sectarian tactics 
of the Bush religious program under the radar. (Mr. Rove even tried to deny 
that the wooden lectern at the Republican convention was a pulpit embedded 
with a cross, as if a nation of eyewitnesses could all be mistaken.) The re-
election juggernaut has not only rounded up the membership rosters of churches 
en masse but quietly mounted official Web sites like 
kerrywrongforcatholics.com as well. (Evangelicals and Mormons have their own 
Web variants on this same theme, but not the Jews, who are apparently getting 
in Kerry just what they deserve.) Even the contraband C-word is being revived 
out of sight of most of the press: Marc Racicot, the Bush-Cheney campaign 
chairman, lobbed a direct-mail fund-raising letter in March describing Mr. 
Bush as "leading a global crusade against terrorism."

In this spring's classic "South Park" parody, "The Passion of the Jew," in 
which Mr. Gibson's movie tosses the community into a religious war, one of the 
kids concludes: "If you want to be Christian, that's cool, but you should 
focus on what Jesus taught instead of how he got killed. Focusing on how he 
got killed is what people did in the Dark Ages, and it ends up with really bad 
results." He has a point. It's far from clear that Mr. Bush's eschatology and 
his religious vanity are leading to good results now. The all-seeing president 
who could pronounce Vladimir Putin saintly by looking into his "soul" is now 
refusing to acknowledge that the reverse may be true. The general in charge of 
tracking down Osama bin Laden, William G. Boykin, has earned cheers in some 
quarters for giving speeches at churches proclaiming that Mr. Bush is "in the 
White House because God put him there" to lead the "army of God" against "a 
guy named Satan." But all that preaching didn't get his day job done; he 
hasn't snared the guy named Osama he was supposed to bring back "dead or 
alive."

"George W. Bush: Faith in the White House" must be seen because it shows how 
someone like General Boykin can stay in his job even in failure and why Mr. 
Bush feels divinely entitled to keep his job even as we stand on the cusp of 
an abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview, faith, or at least a 
certain brand of it, counts more than competence, and a biblical mission, or 
at least a simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile of one, counts more than the 
secular goal of waging an effective, focused battle against an enemy as 
elusive and cunning as terrorists. That no one in this documentary, including 
its hero, acknowledges any constitutional boundaries between church and state 
is hardly a surprise. To them, America is a "Christian nation," period, with 
no need even for the fig-leaf prefix of "Judeo-."

Far more startling is the inability of a president or his acolytes to 
acknowledge any boundary that might separate Mr. Bush's flawed actions 
battling "against the forces of evil" from the righteous dictates of God. What 
that level of hubris might bring in a second term is left to the imagination, 
and "Faith in the White House" gives the imagination room to run riot about 
what a 21st-century crusade might look like in the flesh. A documentary 
conceived as a rebuke to "Fahrenheit 9/11" is nothing if not its unintentional 
and considerably more nightmarish sequel. 





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