Right Joins Reality-Based Community

Conservatives seem pretty worked up over Harriet Miers and her lack of paper trail. In the Wasington Post article above, Cathie Adams, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, says "President Bush is asking us to have faith in things unseen. We only have that kind of faith in God."

Er, um, we thought you people thought he was God. Didn't one of you people say, on TV during the last camapign, "God is in the White House"? Of course that's what you believe. What else would explain your belief in his omniscience regarding WMDs? His omnipotence regarding AIDS in Africa? His omnibenevolence, encapsulated in the meaningless nostrum "compassionate conservatism"?

Of course, not all gods are created equal. In case after case, the President has asked for our faith without offering a credible reason -- and in case after case, he has failed to deliver. As gods go, he's proven to be one of the falser ones.

Sacrilege aside, Bush's critics have been arguing for years that he makes policy decisions based on convictions, rather than facts. The classic expression is Ron Suskind's 2004 Times magazine article, in which he quotes "a senior advisor to Bush" mocking the "reality-based community," those poor deluded fools who believe that "solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." This, according to the advisor, just ain't the way the Administration works. And indeed it hasn't been. Instead of actually analyzing facts, the Prwsident has proudly, boldly, led with his gut -- or, anyway, his big mouth. And the idolaters have gone along, trusting his word rather than the facts.

So Cathie Adams is (shudder!) right on this. Confidence in the President requires a kind of faith which should properly be reserved for God -- and which, when given to a human being, is inevitably misplaced. Welcome aboard, Cathie. Wish you'd gotten here before the ship began to sink.