Ron Suskind on Bush's Certainity

For some discussion and rebuttal of Suskind see Donna at Pajama Pundits and Tom Smith. Also, Ramesh Ponnuru at NRO's The Corner has two posts: first responds to the most provocative parts that quote NRO contributor Bruce Bartlett; the second (scroll down 2 posts) takes up Suskind's piece as a whole.

A disappointed Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly offers his own take of Suskind.

UPDATE:
This from James Lileks: "Interesting piece in the NYT: according to Bruce Bartlett , conservative economist, Bush’s worst problem is that he’s a flaming Jesus nut and hence too much like OBL."

And, then, Lileks excerpts a couple of Suskind's key Bartlett quotes and follows with his usual exquisite commentary:

Got that? New York and the Pentagon are attacked, another plane goes down en route to God knows where, and the President makes a great grand crazy leap of logic: this might be war. Directed the relief effort? For heaven’s sake, did the want the Commander in Chief running down to Ground Zero and handing out bottled water? Sir! We have unconfirmed reports of troop movements in Syria, and our satellites have found unusual activity in some Afghan training camps! Not now, you fool! I have to get these sandwiches to the firefighters!

But back to the main point. I guess Bush wants to kill them all because his religious beliefs make him disinclined to be persuaded, and extreme in his convictions. Ergo agnostics want to kill only some terrorists, and atheists don’t want to kill any ? Look. The problem some people have with Bush isn’t that he believes in God, it’s that he really believes in God. To a certain stratum of our intelligentsia, you’re supposed to believe in God like you believe in continental drift, or the tides, or the yearly reappearance of Shamrock Shakes at McDonald’s. The idea that it’s a two-way conversation strikes many as nonsense, proof that we’re dealing with someone two steps removed from worshipping the moon. I don’t say this as someone who gets daily briefings from the Big Guy Upstairs; for whatever reason, I’ve never felt as if God had me on speed dial. This hasn’t influenced my thoughts about religion in the least, believe it or not. I don’t need Carl Sagan showing up at my door to believe there are billions and billions of stars.

It varies, shall we say. For every believer who feels compelled to drop to his knees you have a Gene Hackman-style priest from “The Poseidon Adventure,” yelling at God. Rational people can have many different manifestations of faith, and it’s a failure of imagination to think there’s but one way.

Duh. I know: duh . But back to the point: The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence . Well, yes. Except, well, no . It depends how you define “evidence.” Bartlett seems to think the problem isn’t what you believe, it’s that you believe. No small distinction. It’s almost a spiritual version of George Carlin’s law: anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.

UPDATE:
See this helpful review of several recently published books about Bush's mix of religion and politics.